AI Is Reshaping Veterinary Medicine and the Exam Room May Never Look the Same

Artificial intelligence is moving beyond medical records and administrative tasks. The next generation of veterinary technology is beginning to listen, analyze, monitor, and collect clinical information from patients—even when they're at home.

Artificial intelligence has officially moved past the novelty stage in veterinary medicine. What began largely as a conversation about whether AI could write medical records or answer client questions has quickly expanded into something much bigger. Companies are now using artificial intelligence to analyze diagnostic images, interpret laboratory data, support clinical decision-making, monitor patients remotely, and even extract medical information from devices most pet owners already have sitting in their pockets.

That shift is attracting attention—and investment—because veterinary medicine presents an unusually compelling problem for technology to solve. Veterinarians are being asked to do more with limited time, specialists aren't equally accessible in every community, pet owners increasingly expect convenient and immediate information, and animals themselves can't tell us when something feels different. The result is a profession where enormous amounts of important information can exist between veterinary visits, but historically there hasn't been an easy way to capture it.

AI may begin to change that.

The most interesting question is no longer whether veterinarians will use artificial intelligence. Increasingly, it's where AI will fit into the relationship between the veterinarian, the patient, and the pet owner—and whether it can actually give clinicians useful information they didn't have before.

AI Is Moving Beyond the Medical Record

Some of the earliest veterinary AI products solved a relatively straightforward problem: veterinarians spend too much time documenting what they do. AI scribes and automated communication platforms offered an obvious value proposition by reducing administrative work and giving veterinary teams time back.

But saving time is only one potential application.

The more consequential evolution is happening as artificial intelligence becomes connected to actual clinical data. Instead of simply summarizing what a veterinarian has already observed, emerging technologies are being developed to analyze radiographs, recognize patterns in diagnostic information, evaluate sounds and images, and follow changes in individual patients over time.

That distinction matters. An AI system that writes a SOAP note makes an existing veterinary task faster. A system capable of collecting or interpreting new clinical information could potentially change the way the veterinarian manages the patient.

One example of that evolution is Sonus Health, which is taking something veterinarians have done for generations, listening to the heart, and combining it with the technology already inside a smartphone.

What If the Smartphone Became Part of the Physical Exam?

Sonus Health has developed a platform that uses the microphone built into a smartphone to capture heart sounds from dogs and cats without requiring a separate digital stethoscope or other piece of hardware. A veterinary professional can make the recording in the clinic, but importantly, a pet owner can also collect a recording at home by positioning the phone against the animal's chest.

The recording can then be analyzed for cardiac information including heart rate, heart rate variability, rhythm, and indications of a possible murmur. Recordings can also be submitted for interpretation by a board-certified veterinary cardiologist.

The idea is deceptively simple, but its implications are interesting. Traditional veterinary auscultation is a snapshot. A veterinarian listens to the animal for a relatively short period during an examination and makes a judgment based on what can be heard at that moment. For many patients, another veterinarian may not listen to that heart again for six months or a year.

Meanwhile, the animal goes home and lives almost its entire life outside the veterinary hospital.

If reliable recordings can be collected at home, auscultation potentially becomes something very different. Instead of one observation made during an annual examination, veterinarians could have a series of recordings collected over weeks or months. A new murmur, a changing heart rate, or another abnormality could potentially trigger a conversation about whether the patient should return for an examination or be referred for additional diagnostics.

The smartphone doesn't replace the veterinarian or the echocardiogram. It potentially gives the veterinarian another piece of information to help decide when those things are needed.

Turning a Moment Into a Timeline

That ability to follow an animal over time may ultimately prove more important than any single AI-generated result.

Veterinary medicine has traditionally been episodic. A patient comes into the hospital, the veterinary team collects information, makes recommendations, and sends the animal home. Unless the owner notices something significant enough to call, the medical record essentially goes quiet until the next visit.

Remote monitoring begins to fill in that blank space.

Imagine a senior dog whose veterinarian detects a questionable heart sound during a wellness examination. Instead of relying entirely on what happened during those few minutes in the exam room, the veterinary team could potentially establish a baseline and follow the patient periodically at home. If something changes, the veterinarian has a reason to investigate. If the findings remain stable, the longitudinal information may provide useful context for future examinations.

The same concept could eventually extend far beyond cardiology. Smartphones already contain increasingly sophisticated microphones, cameras, accelerometers, and processors. Wearable devices are collecting additional information about movement, sleep, activity, and behavior. AI gives developers a way to turn some of those enormous streams of raw information into patterns that may eventually have clinical meaning.

For veterinary medicine, where patients can't describe subtle changes in how they feel, that possibility is especially compelling.

But Can AI Actually Hear a Heart Murmur?

This is also where veterinary medicine has to resist becoming distracted by the word AI. A clever idea isn't enough. If a technology is going to influence medical decisions, veterinarians need to know how it performs.

A 2026 technical evaluation of the Sonus system examined 322 veterinary-labeled smartphone recordings from dogs and cats collected in real-world home and clinical environments. Rather than forcing the algorithm to make a determination on every recording, the system was designed to separate recordings based on the confidence of its interpretation.

Within the highest-confidence group, representing approximately 30% of the recordings evaluated, the system reported 95.9% accuracy, 94% sensitivity, and 97.9% specificity for murmur detection. Recordings that couldn't be interpreted confidently could instead be deferred rather than automatically classified.

That approach is worth paying attention to because one of the biggest challenges facing medical AI isn't simply teaching an algorithm to produce an answer. It's teaching a system when it shouldn't produce one.

Veterinarians already practice medicine this way. Sometimes the correct conclusion isn't normal or abnormal. Sometimes it's I need more information. AI systems that acknowledge uncertainty rather than disguising it may ultimately be more useful clinically than systems designed to deliver an answer every time.

Sonus also describes its technology as a screening and monitoring tool rather than a replacement for echocardiography, specialist evaluation, or a complete veterinary examination. That's an important distinction. A murmur is a finding, not a diagnosis, and its significance depends on everything else veterinarians know about the patient.

The Bigger Opportunity Is Outside the Hospital

The growing interest in veterinary AI is occurring at the same time the profession is confronting another enormous challenge: access to care.

Not every pet owner lives close to a veterinary specialist. Not every client can easily return to the hospital for repeated checks. Rural communities may have limited veterinary availability, while even clients living near major veterinary centers can face long waits for specialty appointments.

Technology can't solve all of those problems, but it can potentially change which information requires a physical trip to the hospital to collect.

That's why smartphone-based tools are particularly interesting. They don't ask owners to purchase an expensive piece of medical equipment that will spend most of its life in a drawer. They use hardware people already own and carry everywhere.

The phone becomes the collection device. AI becomes the first analytical layer. The veterinarian remains the person responsible for interpreting that information in the context of the actual patient.

That model could also become increasingly important for telemedicine. One of the inherent limitations of a virtual veterinary encounter is the inability of the veterinarian to perform a traditional physical examination. A pet owner can describe coughing, show the veterinarian how an animal is breathing, or point a camera toward a lesion, but there are limits to what can be objectively measured from the other side of a screen.

Tools capable of collecting legitimate physiologic information at home could begin to narrow that gap. They won't recreate a complete physical examination, but they may make virtual care considerably more informative than a conversation and a video feed alone.

Veterinarians Aren't Going Anywhere

Whenever artificial intelligence enters a healthcare conversation, the inevitable question follows: what does this mean for the clinician?

In veterinary medicine, the more realistic answer is probably not replacement but augmentation.

An algorithm can identify patterns in a heart recording, but it doesn't know the entire animal. It doesn't know that the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel sitting in front of you has started coughing at night, that the owner has noticed decreased exercise tolerance, or that the patient has lost weight since the last visit unless those pieces of information are brought into the clinical picture.

The veterinarian's job is to put those pieces together.

A heart rate, an AI-generated murmur flag, an abnormal rhythm, or a smartphone recording becomes one part of a much larger story that can include history, breed, age, physical examination findings, laboratory results, imaging, medications, and clinical signs. Technology can potentially make that story richer, but it doesn't remove the need for someone trained to understand what the story means.

That may be where the most useful veterinary AI ultimately lands—not as an artificial veterinarian, but as an additional set of eyes and ears.

There's a Business Story Here, Too

The investment flowing into veterinary AI isn't driven entirely by clinical curiosity. There is also a potentially significant business opportunity.

Technology that simply adds another monthly subscription to a veterinary hospital's software stack may face resistance, particularly as practices become increasingly overwhelmed by the number of platforms they're expected to use. Technology that helps a practice create a new service may be different.

Remote monitoring is one example. A veterinary hospital could potentially incorporate periodic cardiac recordings into senior wellness programs, follow-up care, or monitoring plans for patients with known or questionable cardiac findings. Rather than waiting until the next annual examination, the practice remains connected to the patient over time.

For pet owners, that could provide reassurance and a clearer path for knowing when another examination is appropriate. For veterinarians, it creates an opportunity to identify meaningful changes earlier. And for practices, it potentially transforms technology from another expense into part of an ongoing clinical service.

That combination—better information, greater convenience, and a sustainable business model—is likely to determine which veterinary AI products survive after the initial excitement around artificial intelligence begins to settle.

The Physical Exam Is Getting Bigger

The stethoscope isn't disappearing. Neither is the physical examination, the veterinary hospital, or the veterinarian.

But the boundaries of the examination may be expanding.

For generations, veterinary medicine has largely depended on what clinicians could learn during the relatively short periods when an animal was physically in front of them. The rest of the patient's life happened somewhere else, with the veterinarian relying on the owner to recognize when something had changed enough to warrant another visit.

AI, smartphones, wearables, and remote monitoring are beginning to challenge that model. Instead of seeing an animal's health as a collection of isolated appointments, veterinary medicine may increasingly be able to follow patients across time.

That's a much bigger idea than using artificial intelligence to write a medical record.

The most transformative veterinary AI may ultimately be the technology that helps veterinarians see—or hear—what happens between visits. Sonus Health's attempt to turn the everyday smartphone into a cardiac monitoring tool is one early example of what that future could look like.

The veterinarian will still need to make sense of the information. The patient will still need an examination when something isn't right. And an abnormal heart sound will still sometimes lead to a cardiologist and an echocardiogram.

The difference is that the next clue may not be discovered inside the veterinary hospital.

It might be recorded on the owner's phone while the dog is lying on the couch.

Source: Yahoo Finance coverage of investment and artificial intelligence in veterinary medicine; additional information about Sonus Health from company materials and its 2026 technical evaluation. Disclosure, Sonus Health has a partnership with Vet Candy.