One of the most frustrating things to diagnose is a single, ill-defined pulmonary nodule. It is usually an animal with cancer, and the clinician wants to check it for metastatic disease. For a clear positive answer, we would like to see multiple, well-defined soft tissue nodules in the lungs. Is it … [Read more...]

CT is an excellent imaging modality for looking inside the body. It is a cross-sectional technique, meaning that the images of a volume of the body are seen as consecutive slices (think loaf of sliced bread). CT machines are manufactured for people, and the ones situated in veterinary hospitals are … [Read more...]

Over the last few days, I've talked about the different appearances of poor peritoneal detail. To recap, detail can be focally or diffusely poor, or mottled. Diffuse causes are usually lack of fat or peritoneal effusion, while local or mottled poor detail can be caused by inflammation, small amount … [Read more...]

Yesterday we discussed poor peritoneal detail as an increase in soft tissue opacity and loss of the fat-soft tissue interfaces that show the serosal surfaces of organs. There is another pattern of poor peritoneal detail, that looks like a mottled or streaky increase in soft tissue opacity within the … [Read more...]

One of the subtleties of interpreting abdominal radiographs is peritoneal detail. It's a difficult region to evaluate, since it is the potential space between all the organs. It is normally filled with fat, including the falciform fat ventral to the liver, and mesenteric fat in the omentum. When we … [Read more...]