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.