Will my dog need a lab test prior to diagnostic imaging?

Not necessarily. So, perhaps if people haven't seen... The first thing, very quickly, I want to touch on diagnostic imaging means to me, ultrasonography, radiology, or x-rays, CT scan, MRI, those kind of things, those are imaging type studies. Other lab work might be blood work, CBC chemistry, coagulation panels, that kind of thing. So with that background being said, does your dog need to have lab work before diagnostic imaging is done? And the answer is no. It purely depends on what we are trying to diagnose by doing these studies. So, for example, if an animal comes in with a limp and we're doing x-rays because that's one of the more common things we do, to see if there's a fracture and obviously I don't need to run a blood work and look at the dog's liver and kidney function if I'm worried about if there's a fracture there or not. So, I think that's a prime example of when lab work would not be required. There's multiple others, but I won't go into all of them because there's too many scenarios, but simply put, no, they do not require lab work necessarily before imaging can be done.

They may, especially if any type of sedation is required. That would be the one time I would think, yes, for sure they would. We would want to do some blood work or lab testing, depending on what we are looking for. A baseline blood screen would be right up there with the baseline imaging or x-rays. That can provide additional information for you.

Not necessarily. It really depends on what we're looking for. If it's something related to the heart, for example, we might jump straight to diagnostic imaging, but often we use blood work and x-rays together because they complement each other in diagnostics.

It really depends on the situation. Most of the time, we have our blood work done before our diagnostic imaging. For instance, if your dog has elevated liver values, we would want to look into this via an ultrasound. In our practice, we focus on preventative medicine and annual blood work, allowing us to catch a lot of problems before they become symptomatic. There are cases, however, where a patient comes in feeling sick, in which instance we might have diagnostic imaging going at the same time that our blood work is going. This helps us get a better clinical picture of what's happening and to narrow down the possible causes, leading to a more targeted treatment plan. With dogs and cats coming in for vomiting or diarrhea, the list of possibilities is pages. Because you can think about it, every abdominal organ that could be having problems can cause these symptoms. So we have to very quickly narrow the field down so we can have a targeted treatment plan to figure out how we can address this.

Is it the liver that's having problems? Then we're going to do liver medication and possible hospitalization. There's a lot that goes into it, but these diagnostics are there to help us narrow the field. If I'm looking at a dog that comes in for vomiting and diarrhea and I don't have any imaging or lab work, I have to just treat it symptomatically, and that's not always the best because what if the liver is failing, and we're just addressing tummy upset but we don't address the liver disease. If an older patient vomits and doesn't feel well, the owner doesn't want to or maybe can't afford diagnostic imaging, and we treat it symptomatically, what if that patient has a big cancer tumor in its abdomen. We would have made a completely different decision on what to do and what steps to take if we'd had that imaging.