We are constantly pushing our skills to provide better surgical outcomes with less pain, less surgical trauma, less anesthetic time, and quicker return to function.  Minimally invasive orthopedics allows us to achieve many of these goals with advanced imaging technology and related procedures.

Arthroscopic surgery has been performed in equine and human surgery for nearly 20 years.  It has only been in the last few years that instrumentation has become available to allow small animal surgeons to enter joints arthroscopically.  We have been performing arthroscopy on the elbow and shoulder joints at Vetcision for nearly a year.  Our equipment consists of a combination of the best Stryker, Linvatec, and Storz arthroscopy systems which include a 3 chip video camera and a complement of arthroscopes, power, and hand instruments.  We have recently added a state-of-the-art Sony image storage and retrieval system to document our images.

 In small animal arthroscopy we have become proficient at exploring and treating intra-articular conditions of the elbow and shoulder joint.  We have not concentrated on cruciate repairs in the stifle joint since we feel the best current treatment is the Tibial Plateau Leveling Osteotomy (TPLO) technique.  OCD lesions of the stifle, while rare, can be easily treated with arthroscopy.

Intra-operative Fluoroscopy

As the only veterinary facility in New England to have a C-arm (intra-operative fluoroscopy unit), Vetcision can offer a hole host of new techniques for your pet.  The C-arm is like having X-ray vision during surgery, allowing us to perform certain fracture repairs through small skin incisions, removing metallic implants from healed fractures, and recently removing a sewing needle from the neck of a dog with a tiny incision.  The C-arm is also useful for myelograms, evaluating swallowing with barium, and in performing portograms, pyelograms, and other moving die studies.  The C-arm allows us to use a new cannulated screw system for certain types of fractures.  A fracture is first reduced with external manipulation or percutaneous pointed bone clamps.  These are normally fractures like sacro-iliac luxations, condylar fractures, or other fractures that are repaired with 1 or 2 screws.  A k-wire is then placed perfectly across the fracture line using C-arm visualization.  The special cannulated self drilling, self tapping titanium screw is then slid down the k-wire.  The implant is then screwed into the bone following the k-wire to compress the fracture site.  The k-wire is then removed.

   The C-arm also allows us to more quickly and accurately apply external skeletal fixators.  Using positive profile transcortical pins we can place linear external skelectal fixators including Kirshner, Securos, Imex standard and Imex SKF systems, as well as, Imex circular fixators with linear and angular motors.  These techniques have recently allowed us to stabilize fractures very close to joints that would have previuosly required trans-articular fixators which would compromise the joint.