[close04]

Knowledge of animal anatomy or certain medical procedures are no help in trying to decipher an ultrasound image. I don't think you can just plop an ultrasound scanner into a farmer's hands and have them to do anything truly useful with it, to justify the investment. Not without training.

One option would probably be to have a doctor remotely in a "command center" just looking at these as they are uploaded from the field, and relaying the diagnosis back to the farmer.

[bluGill]

How much training do you need though: A one day class can cover "this is is normal, this is where you need help". Of course these are animals: farmers are willing to make economic decisions here. The risk/cost of a rare disease going undetected vs time to learn how to accurately diagnose it (or pay someone who has the training) is something that can be talked about.

[close04]

> A one day class can cover

...probably not much more than a 1 day C++ course would offer a random person. :)

That's nowhere near what a farmer needs to read much into an ultrasound. It takes a medical student years of learning (medicine) topped by a lot of practice and experience in imaging until they are useful in actually reading an image. And even a 1-2 day course costs thousands of dollars.

It would be a massive expense for very little real life benefit. I'm guessing AI and a remote doctor would do better. I kept reading a lot of good news recently about AI helping with diagnostics in medical imaging so I guess we can't be too far.

[tonyarkles]

Over the weekend I had a veterinarian tell me that he wasn’t capable of properly interpreting an ultrasound! He did an x-ray and saw something concerning, but being Easter weekend there were no ultrasound techs in the office. I had to take my cat to a different clinic, where a pro successfully figured out what was going on.

I agree fully that a 1-day course isn’t going to be enough here. Radiologists go to school for a while to get good at both the imaging part and the interpretation part.