Whether your pet is healthy but needs a screening test, or is ill and requires a diagnostic work-up, Blue Lake Animal Care Center is well-equipped to handle any situation. Our hospital offers extensive diagnostic modalities, including in-house CBC and blood chemistry, urinalysis, digital radiography, blood glucose monitoring, blood pressure monitoring, cytology, EKG, abdominal and cardiac ultrasound, and ultrasound-guided fine needle aspirates . We also employ several national veterinary laboratories when sending out specific diagnostic tests, when required.
Dr. Powell has almost 25 years of experience in small animal medical diagnostics and treatment, both routine and critical, and enjoys tackling cases of all difficulty levels!
Digital Radiography
To provide you with the highest-quality veterinary care for your pet, Blue Lake Animal Care Center owns one of the most state-of-the-art digital X-ray machines on the market. These have several important advantages:
- They can be immediately viewed on a monitor.
- The image quality is outstanding, and can be manipulated for better views of your pet, leading to a faster and more accurate diagnosis.
- They take less time to process, which means less time for your pet on the X-ray table (and less stress), and less waiting time for you.
- Digital X-rays can be sent immediately to specialists when necessary.
Our investment in the best digital X-ray system available reflects a commitment to give you and your pet the highest quality medical care available.
Ultrasound
Ultrasound is a painless, safe, and non-invasive diagnostic tool used to evaluate your pet’s internal organs. Ultrasound uses sound waves to produce a images of your pet’s organs that allows us to see things internally that cannot be detected by X-rays alone.
At Blue Lake Animal Care Center, we use ultrasound to assess the shape, size, structure, and orientation of your pet’s abdominal organs. It can also help assess and diagnose pregnancy. We also use this technology to identify masses or tumors and as a guide during fine needle aspirates or urine collection.
The typical ultrasound does not typically require sedation, and a diagnosis is often available immediately, meaning we can also provide treatment options immediately maximizing efficiency while minimizing stress to you and your pet.
In-House Laboratory
Blue Lake Animal Care Center maintains a complete on-site diagnostic laboratory. This allows us to perform complete blood counts, chemistry profiles, cytology evaluations and other valuable tests for your pet in mere minutes. With our advanced laboratory technology, including IDEXX Hematology and Chemistry analyzers, we can give you fast and accurate results. This is crucial in determining what you pet is suffering from and what treatment is recommended. It is also a critical tool for pre-operative screening tests.
Our complete in-house laboratory is particularly essential to our emergency and critical care cases. For many tests we can attain results within 15 minutes, enabling us to effect treatment rapidly. Contact us if you have any questions about our laboratory capabilities.