By SHELLY STRAUTZ-SPRINGBORN
Michigan Correspondent COLUMBIA, Mo. — Veterinarians no longer have to rely on the naked eye to diagnose lameness in a horse.
The Lameness Locator is an inertial sensor system which places small sensors on a horse’s head, right front limb and croup, near the tail, and monitors the horse’s torso movement while it trots. The recorded information is compared against database records from the movement of both healthy and other lame horses to determine lameness.
Kevin Keegan, a professor of equine surgery in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Missouri-Columbia, has been tracking horse movement related to equine lameness for more than 20 years. Working with Fred Pai, a professor in mechanical engineering at UMC, and Yoshiharu Yonezawa at Hiroshima Institute of Technology in Japan, the team developed the Lameness Locator.
The research had its start in the early 1990s when an endowment was established to study equine lameness, according to Keegan.
“After the endowment was given, we concentrated on trying to develop an objective method of lameness evaluation as an aid primarily for research to more accurately and precisely measure lameness for evaluating a particular treatment or drug,” he said. “We started with treadmills and high-speed cameras, and those worked pretty well, but they weren’t really practical, due to high cost and they cannot be used in the field. Plus, horses do not move on a treadmill like they do on regular ground.
“In some cases with mild lameness, or in cases with multiple limb lameness, even experts looking at the same horse may disagree on whether lameness is present or on its severity. An objective method would be helpful to take some guesswork out of the evaluation.
“There are two reasons why the Lameness Locator is better than the naked eye,” Keegan said. “It samples motion at a higher frequency beyond the capability of the human eye and it removes the bias that frequently accompanies subjective evaluation.”
He said the device aids veterinarians in early detection of lameness, often when it is barely visible. The benefit is it may help streamline evaluations by veterinarians “so they can concentrate more on developing the right therapy or treatment and less time finding out what the problem is.”
The product has drawn attention from outside the veterinary world. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a two-year Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II Grant of $500,000 for further research and development of the current technology.
The grant was awarded to Equinosis, a faculty startup with license from UMC to develop and commercialize the product, after successful completion of a Phase I study which was instrumental in developing the prototype. Equinosis has subcontracted to UMC to complete some of the additional research.
In this second NSF grant, the goals include expanding analysis to other gaits in horses, like the foxtrot, pace and canter, improving existing analysis sensitivity, developing a parallel device for horses that measures incoordination from neurological disease, improving sensor design, expanding analysis to type lameness based on diagnosis, developing sensors and expanding analysis to detect and evaluate lameness in dogs and porting existing analysis to run efficiently on smaller computing platforms such as cell phones or iPads.
“Our biggest challenge now is to introduce this to veterinarians, train them on the proper usage and interpretation of the data and show them that it really works,” Keegan said.
More technical information can be found at www.equinosis.com |
