Heart disease is among the most common serious conditions in dogs and cats, and a heart murmur heard on auscultation is one of the earliest signs of such disease; such murmurs are often subtle and challenging to detect at early stages. General-practice veterinary examinations catch only a fraction of these murmurs, and definitive cardiac assessment typically requires either a board-certified cardiologist or an in-clinic echocardiogram, which may involve cost and scheduling constraints. We describe Sonus Health, a smartphone-based screening system that analyses an auscultation recording of approximately thirty seconds or longer - captured by a pet owner at home or by a veterinarian or nurse in clinic - and returns a tiered result within moments. The system was evaluated on 322 veterinary-labelled recordings under standard out-of-fold cross-validation. For recordings assigned to the high-confidence tier (30% of cases), accuracy reaches 95.9%, with 94.0% sensitivity and 97.9% specificity. Uncertain cases are prospectively routed to veterinary review rather than assigned an automated classification. Results are stable across standard and group-aware cross-validation, a held-out test sp
Citation excerpts can be used to increase the reliability of generated outputs and their faithfulness to cited sources, which is especially important in high-stakes domains such as human and veterinary medicine. However, this does not guarantee that generated claims are faithful to the provided excerpts. We present VetScore, a multi-step evaluation method for veterinary long-form question answering, designed to assess how well are generated claims supported by the provided excerpts, weighing this information by each claim's harm potential. VetScore first segments the output and decomposes it into individual claims, then scores each claim with respect to its harm potential and evaluates its faithfulness to source excerpts, and finally calculates the overall risk-adjusted score. We collect an expert-annotated meta-evaluation dataset, evaluate our approach with a range of judge models, and show that it achieves high correlations with veterinary experts even with small judge models, while offering explainability across multiple dimensions.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in clinical settings, yet their performance in veterinary medicine remains underexplored. We evaluated three commercially available veterinary-focused LLM summarization tools (Product 1 [Hachiko] and Products 2 and 3) on a standardized dataset of veterinary oncology records. Using a rubric-guided LLM-as-a-judge framework, summaries were scored across five domains: Factual Accuracy, Completeness, Chronological Order, Clinical Relevance, and Organization. Product 1 achieved the highest overall performance, with a median average score of 4.61 (IQR: 0.73), compared to 2.55 (IQR: 0.78) for Product 2 and 2.45 (IQR: 0.92) for Product 3. It also received perfect median scores in Factual Accuracy and Chronological Order. To assess the internal consistency of the grading framework itself, we repeated the evaluation across three independent runs. The LLM grader demonstrated high reproducibility, with Average Score standard deviations of 0.015 (Product 1), 0.088 (Product 2), and 0.034 (Product 3). These findings highlight the importance of veterinary-specific commercial LLM tools and demonstrate that LLM-as-a-judge evaluation is a scalable and
Veterinary electronic health records (vEHRs) contain privacy-sensitive identifiers that limit secondary use. While PetEVAL provides a benchmark for veterinary de-identification, the domain remains low-resource. This study evaluates whether large language model (LLM)-generated synthetic narratives improve de-identification safety under distinct training regimes, emphasizing (i) synthetic augmentation and (ii) fixed-budget substitution. We conducted a controlled simulation using a PetEVAL-derived corpus (3,750 holdout/1,249 train). We generated 10,382 synthetic notes using a privacy-preserving "template-only" regime where identifiers were removed prior to LLM prompting. Three transformer backbones (PetBERT, VetBERT, Bio_ClinicalBERT) were trained under varying mixtures. Evaluation prioritized document-level leakage rate (the fraction of documents with at least one missed identifier) as the primary safety outcome. Results show that under fixed-sample substitution, replacing real notes with synthetic ones monotonically increased leakage, indicating synthetic data cannot safely replace real supervision. Under compute-matched training, moderate synthetic mixing matched real-only performa
Veterinary pharmacovigilance systems are essential for monitoring adverse drug events (ADEs), yet existing approaches often fail to capture region-specific toxicity patterns shaped by local biological and regulatory contexts. In Japan, these challenges are amplified by species-specific metabolic differences and reporting practices defined by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries (MAFF). Most prior work relies on prediction-oriented models, limiting mechanistic interpretability. This study proposes a regulatory-integrated unsupervised framework for pattern discovery using the National Veterinary Assay Laboratory (NVAL) database. ADEs are encoded into organ system-aligned representations and adjusted for species-specific reporting biases, enabling cross-species comparison. Similarity-based clustering and dimensionality reduction are applied to identify latent toxicity structures. Analysis of 4,120 high-confidence ADE reports (9,080 drug-ADE combinations) identified three significant species clusters (p < 0.01), including hepatic-dominant patterns in companion animals (0.42 $\pm$ 0.06), renal toxicity in ruminants (0.39 $\pm$ 0.07), and dermatological sensitivity in
Veterinary medical records represent a large data resource for application to veterinary and One Health clinical research efforts. Use of the data is limited by interoperability challenges including inconsistent data formats and data siloing. Clinical coding using standardized medical terminologies enhances the quality of medical records and facilitates their interoperability with veterinary and human health records from other sites. Previous studies, such as DeepTag and VetTag, evaluated the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automate veterinary diagnosis coding, employing long short-term memory (LSTM) and transformer models to infer a subset of Systemized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) diagnosis codes from free-text clinical notes. This study expands on these efforts by incorporating all 7,739 distinct SNOMED-CT diagnosis codes recognized by the Colorado State University (CSU) Veterinary Teaching Hospital (VTH) and by leveraging the increasing availability of pre-trained language models (LMs). 13 freely-available pre-trained LMs were fine-tuned on the free-text notes from 246,473 manually-coded veterinary patient visits included in the CSU
Self-supervised learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training deep neural networks, particularly in medical imaging where labeled data is scarce. While current approaches typically rely on synthetic augmentations of single images, we propose VET-DINO, a framework that leverages a unique characteristic of medical imaging: the availability of multiple standardized views from the same study. Using a series of clinical veterinary radiographs from the same patient study, we enable models to learn view-invariant anatomical structures and develop an implied 3D understanding from 2D projections. We demonstrate our approach on a dataset of 5 million veterinary radiographs from 668,000 canine studies. Through extensive experimentation, including view synthesis and downstream task performance, we show that learning from real multi-view pairs leads to superior anatomical understanding compared to purely synthetic augmentations. VET-DINO achieves state-of-the-art performance on various veterinary imaging tasks. Our work establishes a new paradigm for self-supervised learning in medical imaging that leverages domain-specific properties rather than merely adapting natural image techniq
We present VetClaw, an edge-cloud multimodal agentic system for early veterinary disease screening. VetClaw uses a camera module as an edge sensing device and sends captured images, together with optional symptom descriptions, to a server-hosted vision-language model for zero-shot disease classification. The system separates agent interaction from workflow orchestration: OpenClaw provides scheduling, tool access, user interaction, and notification services on the edge device, while LangGraph manages the stateful screening workflow, including input validation, image transmission, model invocation, safety checks, conditional routing, failure handling, and structured logging. This design moves beyond static image classification by enabling the system to collect visual evidence, invoke external models, apply deterministic safety rules, and generate diagnostic-support alerts. Results show that image-only VLM prediction remains limited, whereas symptom-guided and multimodal inputs improve zero-shot classification performance. Thus, VetClaw transforms a static prediction model into a coordinated, safety-aware system that can use tools, manage workflows, handle failures, and escalate uncer
Ammonium ferric hexacyanoferrate is a veterinary-medical milestone and antidote against radiocesium, well-known as Giese-salt after the Chernobyl disaster fed to domestic and wild animals, which shows even a rich interplay of properties in nanostructural chemistry and ferromagnetism. Among the broad analytical techniques, the ambivalence of macroscopic micrometer-sized agglomerates and nanoparticle sizes, a suggested enlarged Fe(II)$-$C$\equiv$N$-$Fe(III) bond length by Fe K-edge XAFS results and multi-level spin relaxation in $^{57}$Fe Mössbauer spectroscopy are highlighted. This sets this underestimated compound in a new light, e.g., for modern biomedicine and biofunctionality, extending its essential importance in addition to hypothetical future nuclear incidents
ChatGPT, the most accessible generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool, offers considerable potential for veterinary medicine, yet a dedicated review of its specific applications is lacking. This review concisely synthesizes the latest research and practical applications of ChatGPT within the clinical, educational, and research domains of veterinary medicine. It intends to provide specific guidance and actionable examples of how generative AI can be directly utilized by veterinary professionals without a programming background. For practitioners, ChatGPT can extract patient data, generate progress notes, and potentially assist in diagnosing complex cases. Veterinary educators can create custom GPTs for student support, while students can utilize ChatGPT for exam preparation. ChatGPT can aid in academic writing tasks in research, but veterinary publishers have set specific requirements for authors to follow. Despite its transformative potential, careful use is essential to avoid pitfalls like hallucination. This review addresses ethical considerations, provides learning resources, and offers tangible examples to guide responsible implementation. Carefully selected, up-to-date lin
Automatic diagnosis of canine pneumothorax is challenged by data scarcity and the need for trustworthy models. To address this, we first introduce a public, pixel-level annotated dataset to facilitate research. We then propose a novel diagnostic paradigm that reframes the task as a synergistic process of signal localization and spectral detection. For localization, our method employs a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to guide an iterative Flow Matching process, which progressively refines segmentation masks to achieve superior boundary accuracy. For detection, the segmented mask is used to isolate features from the suspected lesion. We then apply Random Matrix Theory (RMT), a departure from traditional classifiers, to analyze these features. This approach models healthy tissue as predictable random noise and identifies pneumothorax by detecting statistically significant outlier eigenvalues that represent a non-random pathological signal. The high-fidelity localization from Flow Matching is crucial for purifying the signal, thus maximizing the sensitivity of our RMT detector. This synergy of generative segmentation and first-principles statistical analysis yields a highly accurate and i
While the global integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into veterinary medicine is accelerating, its adoption dynamics in major markets such as China remain uncharacterized. This paper presents the first exploratory analysis of AI perception and adoption among veterinary professionals in China, based on a cross-sectional survey of 455 practitioners conducted in mid-2025. We identify a distinct "adoption paradox": although 71.0% of respondents have incorporated AI into their workflows, 44.6% of these active users report low familiarity with the technology. In contrast to the administrative-focused patterns observed in North America, adoption in China is practitioner-driven and centers on core clinical tasks, such as disease diagnosis (50.1%) and prescription calculation (44.8%). However, concerns regarding reliability and accuracy remain the primary barrier (54.3%), coexisting with a strong consensus (93.8%) for regulatory oversight. These findings suggest a unique "inside-out" integration model in China, characterized by high clinical utility but restricted by an "interpretability gap," underscoring the need for specialized tools and robust regulatory frameworks to safely har
The safe use of pharmaceuticals in food-producing animals is vital to protect animal welfare and human food safety. Adverse events (AEs) may signal unexpected pharmacokinetic or toxicokinetic effects, increasing the risk of violative residues in the food chain. This study introduces a predictive framework for classifying outcomes (Death vs. Recovery) using ~1.28 million reports (1987-2025 Q1) from the U.S. FDA's OpenFDA Center for Veterinary Medicine. A preprocessing pipeline merged relational tables and standardized AEs through VeDDRA ontologies. Data were normalized, missing values imputed, and high-cardinality features reduced; physicochemical drug properties were integrated to capture chemical-residue links. We evaluated supervised models, including Random Forest, CatBoost, XGBoost, ExcelFormer, and large language models (Gemma 3-27B, Phi 3-12B). Class imbalance was addressed, such as undersampling and oversampling, with a focus on prioritizing recall for fatal outcomes. Ensemble methods(Voting, Stacking) and CatBoost performed best, achieving precision, recall, and F1-scores of 0.95. Incorporating Average Uncertainty Margin (AUM)-based pseudo-labeling of uncertain cases improv
Recently, with increasing interest in pet healthcare, the demand for computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems in veterinary medicine has increased. The development of veterinary CAD has stagnated due to a lack of sufficient radiology data. To overcome the challenge, we propose a generative active learning framework based on a variational autoencoder. This approach aims to alleviate the scarcity of reliable data for CAD systems in veterinary medicine. This study utilizes datasets comprising cardiomegaly radiograph data. After removing annotations and standardizing images, we employed a framework for data augmentation, which consists of a data generation phase and a query phase for filtering the generated data. The experimental results revealed that as the data generated through this framework was added to the training data of the generative model, the frechet inception distance consistently decreased from 84.14 to 50.75 on the radiograph. Subsequently, when the generated data were incorporated into the training of the classification model, the false positive of the confusion matrix also improved from 0.16 to 0.66 on the radiograph. The proposed framework has the potential to address t
Large language models (LLMs) can extract information from veterinary electronic health records (EHRs), but performance differences between models, the effect of temperature settings, and the influence of text ambiguity have not been previously evaluated. This study addresses these gaps by comparing the performance of GPT-4 omni (GPT-4o) and GPT-3.5 Turbo under different conditions and investigating the relationship between human interobserver agreement and LLM errors. The LLMs and five humans were tasked with identifying six clinical signs associated with Feline chronic enteropathy in 250 EHRs from a veterinary referral hospital. At temperature 0, the performance of GPT-4o compared to the majority opinion of human respondents, achieved 96.9% sensitivity (interquartile range [IQR] 92.9-99.3%), 97.6% specificity (IQR 96.5-98.5%), 80.7% positive predictive value (IQR 70.8-84.6%), 99.5% negative predictive value (IQR 99.0-99.9%), 84.4% F1 score (IQR 77.3-90.4%), and 96.3% balanced accuracy (IQR 95.0-97.9%). The performance of GPT-4o was significantly better than that of its predecessor, GPT-3.5 Turbo, particularly with respect to sensitivity where GPT-3.5 Turbo only achieved 81.7% (IQR
In the rapidly evolving landscape of veterinary healthcare, integrating machine learning (ML) clinical decision-making tools with electronic health records (EHRs) promises to improve diagnostic accuracy and patient care. However, the seamless integration of ML classifiers into existing EHRs in veterinary medicine is frequently hindered by the rigidity of EHR systems or the limited availability of IT resources. To address this shortcoming, we present Anna, a freely-available software solution that provides ML classifier results for EHR laboratory data in real-time.
This paper explores the innovative use of simulation environments to enhance data acquisition and diagnostics in veterinary medicine, focusing specifically on gait analysis in dogs. The study harnesses the power of Blender and the Blenderproc library to generate synthetic datasets that reflect diverse anatomical, environmental, and behavioral conditions. The generated data, represented in graph form and standardized for optimal analysis, is utilized to train machine learning algorithms for identifying normal and abnormal gaits. Two distinct datasets with varying degrees of camera angle granularity are created to further investigate the influence of camera perspective on model accuracy. Preliminary results suggest that this simulation-based approach holds promise for advancing veterinary diagnostics by enabling more precise data acquisition and more effective machine learning models. By integrating synthetic and real-world patient data, the study lays a robust foundation for improving overall effectiveness and efficiency in veterinary medicine.
We present a comprehensive study on fully automated pollen recognition across both conventional optical and digital in-line holographic microscopy (DIHM) images of sample slides. Visually recognizing pollen in unreconstructed holographic images remains challenging due to speckle noise, twin-image artifacts and substantial divergence from bright-field appearances. We establish the performance baseline by training YOLOv8s for object detection and MobileNetV3L for classification on a dual-modality dataset of automatically annotated optical and affinely aligned DIHM images. On optical data, detection mAP50 reaches 91.3% and classification accuracy reaches 97%, whereas on DIHM data, we achieve only 8.15% for detection mAP50 and 50% for classification accuracy. Expanding the bounding boxes of pollens in DIHM images over those acquired in aligned optical images achieves 13.3% for detection mAP50 and 54% for classification accuracy. To improve object detection in DIHM images, we employ a Wasserstein GAN with spectral normalization (WGAN-SN) to create synthetic DIHM images, yielding an FID score of 58.246. Mixing real-world and synthetic data at the 1.0 : 1.5 ratio for DIHM images improves
In the cutting-edge domain of medical artificial intelligence (AI), remarkable advances have been achieved in areas such as diagnosis, prediction, and therapeutic interventions. Despite these advances, the technology for image segmentation faces the significant barrier of having to produce extensively annotated datasets. To address this challenge, few-shot segmentation (FSS) has been recognized as one of the innovative solutions. Although most of the FSS research has focused on human health care, its application in veterinary medicine, particularly for pet care, remains largely limited. This study has focused on accurate segmentation of the heart and left atrial enlargement on canine chest radiographs using the proposed deep prototype alignment network (DPANet). The PANet architecture is adopted as the backbone model, and experiments are conducted using various encoders based on VGG-19, ResNet-18, and ResNet-50 to extract features. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DPANet achieves the highest performance. In the 2way-1shot scenario, it achieves the highest intersection over union (IoU) value of 0.6966, and in the 2way-5shot scenario, it achieves the highest IoU val
This study presents a real-world canine heart sound dataset and evaluates SoNUS version 3.2.x, a machine learning algorithm for preliminary cardiac analysis using smartphone microphone recordings. More than one hundred recordings were collected from dogs across four continents, with thirty eight recordings annotated by board certified veterinary cardiologists for quantitative evaluation. SoNUS version 3.2.x employs a multi-stage fallback architecture with quality-aware filtering to ensure reliable output under variable recording conditions. The primary sixty second model achieved mean and median heart rate accuracies of ninety one point six three percent and ninety four point nine five percent, while a fast model optimized for thirty to forty second recordings achieved mean and median accuracies of eighty eight point eight six percent and ninety two point nine eight percent. These results demonstrate the feasibility of extracting clinically relevant cardiac information from opportunistic smartphone recordings, supporting scalable preliminary assessment and telehealth applications in veterinary cardiology.