This $150 3D-Printed Laryngoscope Is Changing How Vet Students Learn to Intubate Goats

Auburn's College of Veterinary Medicine teamed up with engineering students to solve a problem every large-animal instructor knows well: you can only fit one set of eyes down a goat's airway at a time

Intubating a goat is nothing like intubating a Labrador, and it is even less like teaching a room full of students to do it at the same time. The airway is small, the window to see it is smaller, and traditionally only the student holding the laryngoscope gets a real view of what is happening. Everyone else in the room is left listening to a play by play instead of watching the procedure unfold.

Auburn University's College of Veterinary Medicine just built a fix, and it costs about as much as a nice pair of scrub shoes.

A $30 Borescope Sparks a Better Idea

The project started small. Veterinary technician Katie Ray had coached hundreds of students through their first large-animal intubations using a standard metal laryngoscope, and she needed footage of the procedure for a continuing education presentation. Human medicine had already moved toward video laryngoscopes to improve visibility and guide tube placement, but nothing equivalent existed for ruminants, so Ray built her own workaround with a thirty dollar borescope camera clipped to her phone.

The homemade rig worked well enough that she started using it in labs to give students a clearer view during intubation. Anesthesia resident Dr. Nassim Bouhabib joined the effort and mounted the camera directly onto the laryngoscope itself, and from there the idea had enough momentum to become a real engineering project instead of a classroom hack.

Vet Med Meets Mechanical Engineering

Ray and Bouhabib brought the concept to Auburn's Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, where mechanical engineering students Will Jones and Cooper Rice took it on inside the Mechanical Polymer Additive Manufacturing Laboratory. Over the better part of a year, the team cycled through multiple prototypes, with the engineering students visiting the veterinary campus to watch the device in action and fold feedback into each new version.

For Jones, still a few years from graduation, the collaboration offered an early look at what cross-disciplinary problem solving actually looks like outside a classroom. The finished device features a lever-controlled camera that lets users adjust the viewing angle, a display screen that shows the intubation in real time, and an adjustable blade sized to fit animals of different sizes, all built for roughly one hundred fifty dollars.

A Teaching Tool First, a Clinical Tool Second

Traditional laryngoscopes are not going away, and Auburn's students still learn on them. What the new device adds is visibility for everyone else in the room, which matters most for students who have never worked hands-on with a goat or pig before their first large-animal lab. Ray described the payoff in simple terms: it is a teaching enhancement, built for the students who learn best by seeing a procedure rather than having it explained to them.

The team has submitted a paper for publication that will include the files needed to 3D print the device, which means practitioners and veterinary schools elsewhere will eventually be able to replicate the tool for their own labs rather than sourcing a commercial equivalent that, for large-animal medicine, simply does not exist yet.

Why This Matters Beyond Auburn

Large-animal medicine has long been the harder subject to teach at scale, in part because the equipment built for human and small-animal procedures rarely translates cleanly to a goat, a calf, or a pig. Auburn's laryngoscope is a small device solving a specific classroom problem, but it is also a reminder that some of the most useful innovation in veterinary education right now is coming from low-cost, student-built solutions rather than expensive commercial hardware. For a profession that is constantly asked to do more large-animal training with fewer specialized tools, that is a trend worth watching.

Editorial note: insert the two required internal links here before publish, one to the Vet Candy CE or veterinary education hub page and one to a related article on veterinary school innovation, per the site's two-link rule.

Reporting drawn from Auburn University's official coverage of the College of Veterinary Medicine and Samuel Ginn College of Engineering laryngoscope project, published September 16, 2026.