Emma Laws with her dog Osho

CATS stand a better chance of keeping all of their nine lives due to tech breakthroughs. Emma Laws, a veterinary neurologist and the hospital director of London Vet Specialists in Belsize Park, said advanced imaging has meant brain surgery is now becoming an increasingly common procedure to save pets from tumours.

“Before that it was quite rare for people to go ahead with it,” Ms Laws told the New Journal.

The surgery is particularly effective when treating cats suffering from the most common form of tumour affecting the species.

“We use the images to show us where the tumour is, and it looks different to the brain tissue, so we know where it is, and we can take it out,” Ms Laws said.

Thanks to the new scanning equipment – similar to machines used to scan humans in hospitals – the procedure has become almost routine for Ms Laws.

“We can do brain surgeries and I’ve done many of these now, and these cats can live years of a really good quality life,” she said.

Advances in veterinary medicine have come rapidly in recent years, revolutionising everything from surgery to cancer treatment.

“We use specially-designed veterinary equipment for the CT and the heart scans, and that’s something that is more recent, because we used to have to use the human kit,” said Ms Laws.

“But obviously, some of our patients are very small, and some of our patients are actually very big, like a Great Dane. Or we did an MRI on a jaguar in my previous job.”

Meanwhile, techniques learned from human medicine – including keyhole surgery and radiotherapy – are now being imported into animal treatment.

“Spays used to be done via open abdominal surgery, but we can now do spays via keyhole,” Ms Laws said. “Keyhole surgery has been in the human field for a while, but it came to veterinary [medicine] a little bit later, and it’s now advancing and it’s got to the point now where you can see the video live on a screen while you’re looking inside the stomach.”

Vets can now stream bronchoscopy procedures – where an animal’s airway is checked – live on their mobile phone.

“I could be sitting in my office and be seeing a video of my colleague over there who’s looking down a patient’s airway,” Ms Laws said. While it might seem like these procedures could break the bank – for example, the cost for a course of radiotherapy can run into thousands of pounds – Ms Laws said advanced treatments are “perfectly within reason” for “well-insured pets.”

And while animal medicine is informed by advances in human treatment, “it also works the other way,” Ms Laws said. “One of the more powerful examples of that is that in cats, we’ve had a disease caused by a ­coronavirus – it’s really nasty and it used to be fatal for cats.

“We found a drug in veterinary medicine that essentially cured them… So when coronavirus hit the human population, we already had a lot of research in the back about it.”