AI and the veterinary profession

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On this week's episode of The Vet Blast Podcast, our host Adam Christman, DVM, MBA, joins Whitney Miller, DVM, DACVPM, chief veterinarian at Petco, to learn more her journey into veterinary medicine and the work she does with Petco. She also describes how AI can be a beneficial tool for veterinary professionals, specifically with radiology cases.

Below is a partial transcript.

Whitney Miller, DVM, DACVPM: From both a personal and Petco standpoint, we made a huge commitment at the beginning of this year, and we rolled out to all of our full service general practices the AI radiology technology. So that's really where we're kind of—I don't know if 'dipping the feet in' is the right term since we went big scale at the start, but definitely, we're still learning a ton and how to apply that to the day to day case workup for our veterinarians.

You know, when you're working with cases you're taking those radiographs, typically, if you want or would like a expert review, [and] you're sending it off. During COVID-19, we saw super long lead times to get the radiologist's review back. Some of those are improving but this [AI technology] is an almost instantaneous read on that radiograph that our doctors can look at and leverage, again, as another tool in the toolbox. So I think kind of trying to allay that fear of AI is going to come in replace specialists, replace our diagnostic capabilities as veterinarians. That is not something that we advocate or even think is really going to happen.

Probably a lot of general practitioners out there, emergency practices, are looking at AI cytology. There's other things that are out there around AI within anesthetic monitoring, or other applications. I think that folks are still really learning what's going on there.