The Siui Apogee 2300 is one of a handful of portable ultrasound scanners with image quality that is truly suitable for equine scanning, making it a rarity in a market dominated by MyLab, Sonosite, Mindray and GE systems. Last week, I tried to obtain some cardiac views with the phased array probe, accompanied by a veterinarian. I am an Echocardiographer, but usually scan small animals or humans, so this was all new to me. Please excuse, therefore, the off-axis views – it was a thrill simply to see the heart, particularly on a beautifully sunny day which made it quite difficult to see the monitor.

I was really amazed at the relative ease with which the machine could obtain high-quality images. As you can see from the clip below, even at 3.3MHz (the probe goes down to 1.5), the transducer has little problem penetrating. The only limiting factor here was the operator!