Assessing Canine Cardiac Health: An In-depth Look at the HSVR Method

VRU 2023 - 64(3): 378-384

Background: The authors explain the importance of radiographic assessment of cardiac silhouette size in dogs and the limitations of the existing method, the vertebral heart size (VHS).

Study: The authors propose a new method, the heart-to-single vertebra ratio (HSVR), which uses the length of a single thoracic vertebra to normalize the cardiac axes, and compare it with VHS in terms of agreement and reliability.

Methods: The authors retrospectively evaluate thoracic radiographs of 80 dogs of different breeds, sizes, and cardiac conditions, and measure the VHS and HSVR using different thoracic vertebrae. They also assess the intra- and inter-observer agreement among three observers with different levels of experience.

Results: The authors find that HSVR shows substantial agreement with VHS, with low bias and error, and that HSVRT7 (using the seventh thoracic vertebra) is the most preferable index. They also find that HSVR has good to excellent inter- and intra-observer agreement, indicating its reliability and objectivity.

Limitations: The authors acknowledge that the high experience of the observers may limit the generalizability of the results, and that HSVR may need breed-specific cut-off values, similar to VHS, to account for the variability among different canine morphotypes.

Conclusions: The authors conclude that HSVR is a simple and reliable method for assessing the cardiac silhouette size in dogs, especially in those with thoracic spine alterations, and that it could offer a valuable alternative to VHS.

Representative right lateral thoracic radiographic image (kVp 80; mAs 4) of a mixed-breed dog depicting the measurements of the length of each single vertebral body between T4 and T8, including the corresponding caudal intervertebral disc spaces (black and white dotted arrows labelled T4–T8). The cardiac long axis (LA) and short axis (SA) were measured as described by Buchanan and Bücheler.8 In this method, the LA (black doubled-headed arrow) was traced from the ventral border of the carina to the cardiac apex and the SA (white doubled-headed arrow) was traced perpendicular to LA at the point of the maximum width of the cardiac silhouette, and then transposed ventral to the column starting from the T4 cranial endplate

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