Long Time No Update...

Apologies for the long time between posts, I keep meaning to get here but then find its 2am and I have to work the next day, so it never seems to happen!

This week I have looked at a few horses, I went to a farm and looked at about a dozen, mostly out of work though. I have discovered that the more peak physical condition the horses are in, the more that shows up.

Anyway on to some pictures, I know that's what most people want to see!


First up is a 2yo with a peculiar heat 'band' around his neck.

As you can see its on both sides. This was confirmed by the owner as this horse often shows signs of heat here, for no apparent reason.

This horse has a knee problem, interesting the heat has travelled down the leg like this.

This doesn't need much explanation! This camera is the most excellent tool for saddle fitting and does not tell a lie. Interestingly the horses back at this stage showed no ill affects from the saddle (although as a new break in possibly hadn't had enough time to show them)

A perfectly healthy dog, I will ad pictures of the same breed of dog, aged and arthritic.

If you look closely at this dog, you will notice its right eye ball is a different colour to the left, this dog had received trauma to the right eyeball.

And some legs!.

I have quite a lot more pictures, including lots of hooves, so will post them in a day or 2.

More interesting pictures!

well since my horses seem to be very evenly coloured, and therefore both boring and perfectly fine and healthy, I have had to look further afield for horses that are injured or suspect, just to give me some reference material, and allow me to work the gear a little harder.

I have booked a very interesting problem with a young horse for tomorrow afternoon, having already seen the Xrays of this particular horse, its going to be very interesting to see what I can 'see'. I also have a few racehorses next week including an injured one to look over, so some more interesting things are going to come up.

Today I ran the camera over a couple of racehorses. These horses are in full work, not too far off racing and in complete apparent health, it was only of interest to me they were looked at.

Fantastically for me these horses are very different under the Camera than a bunch of molly-coddled sport horses (mine)

This was me playing with the software on the first picture taken. I think its really cool that I can draw a line, or a box and have it tell me the highest and lowest temperatures along (or in) it.

Clearly this horse was pretty warm, but the spread of heat is fairly excessive over the majority of the body.

However this is the same horse on the other side!

This is a pretty neat picture of the blood flow just under the skin. This is a particularly thin skinned TB.

Here I have dialled out the majority of the heat, so I get a true image of the actual area's showing excess heat. The red spot half way up his shoulder is a laceration.

I found this particularly interesting, I will do weekly follow ups on this horse to see if anything comes of it, or if it was merely a black horse in the sunlight radiating more heat on one side.

Here is his front legs, there was one red spot on the leg that showed on both sides, will keep an eye on that too, noticing the blue area on the cannon bone I was a little (or a lot!) concerned, however it was where he had just wiped half his dinner up his leg......his dinner was clearly cold!

Introducing......

Hot Spots Thermal Imaging Limited

The camera has arrived!

So maybe your wondering, what is Thermal Imaging?

Well!! you have come to the right place!

Thermal imaging is the use of Infrared to give a picture of the skin temperature, thus giving a very accurate picture of soft tissue injury/damage or area's of increased blood flow.

Infrared is completely non invasive, and is one of the only non invasive ways to evaluate blood flow to the hoof of the horse (fantastic for laminitis/abcesses/ringbone/sidebone etc)

The idea of Hot Spots Thermal Imaging Limited is to offer a service to horse owners, especially those who have mystery lameness or complaints with their horses, and really do not know where to begin with treatment. Thermal Imaging will help horse owners decided what steps need to be taken to remedy the situation, if we can pin point the area where the problem is.

We can also evaluate your saddle fit, check a horse over for pre-purchase, use for competition horse maintenance, and even do follow up treatments to see how your treatments are working.

If you have a problem, give me a call, maybe I can help.

Well I have had a fun couple of days playing with the camera, testing out what it can do, changing settings. Ran it over 3 of my horses on the first day, and both to my happiness and disappointment, there is nothing wrong with any of them!

So tonight I worked 2 of them and then took pictures. Interesting the changes actually.

Firstly looking at legs:

These are the legs of a non-broken in horse, notice the even temperature in all 4 legs.

These are the legs of a horse that has just had a 20 minute flat work session.

Interesting to see the dramatic increase in temperature in a relatively short and easy ride.

Back legs too. I forgot to take a 'before' picture of this particular horse prior to the ride, but have run the camera over him twice in the last 2 days and this is a lot hotter than he was prior to riding!

The camera allows me to pin-point temperature in certain area's, I couldn't believe a staggering 8.8 degree difference between the top of his pastern and his tendon, it shows just how important it is to keep these legs cooled down after extreme exertion.

It will be very interesting to see what they are like after jumping, and especially when the ground gets hard.

I also checked out the saddle.

the heat is showing really evenly, in actual fact there is a reason for this.

This is an old macs back pad. As you can see there is a couple of lower heat points and it also looks as if the the right hand side is hotter.

I rode 2 horses tonight, but hadn't put the memory card in to save the images from the other horse, however I could still view them. On his image of the Old Macs pad, the heat distribution was completely even, so the heat differences are very much related to this horse.

However it certainly looks like the Old Macs pad is distributing the pressure really well because..

Here is his back after the ride, and there looks to be no area's of concern at all. So I have to say I will be continuing to use the old macs pad!

And there he is again, and again there are no areas there that concern me at this stage at all.

My horses are certainly going to benefit untold amounts by me having this machine.