LEXINGTON, Ky. — The Keeneland Association is donating $100,000 to leading equine research group, Grayson Jockey Club Research Foundation.

What You Need To Know

  • Keeneland is pledging $100K over four years to Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation 

  • The money will help fund a project that compares MRI to PET imaging when assessing injuries in sport horses

  • Rood and Riddle use PET imaging and medical staff say it provides a more detailed map of the bone and areas of concern

One major project the money from Keeneland will help fund is research comparing PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans and MRI imaging of fetlock injuries on sport horse. The fetlock joint is essentially the ankle of a horse and they have them on all four legs. Only two equine PET machines exist right now in Kentucky, one of them at Rood and Riddle in Lexington.

Thoroughbred or not, Rood and Riddle director of diagnostic imaging, Dr. Katie Garrett said all sport horses have something in common.

“We have so many sport horses; we have saddlebreds, backyard ponies. I mean, we have everything here. All of these horses get injured. This is part of any athletic endeavor,” Garrett said.

Fetlock injuries are responsible for the early retirement of sport horses. The most common diagnostic test is an MRI, but a more recent phenomenon is using PET scans on equine.

“We get a map, a detailed map of exactly where this horse is; the bone is being asked to do an appropriate amount of work or maybe where the work for that particular horse, we’re asking too much,” Garrett said.

Grayson Jockey Club Research Foundation funded the first PET scans on equine athletes in 2015.

“From 2016, we had never PET scanned a horse and by the end of this year, I believe there will be 12-13 of those machines in the United States to use for equine care with two of them being located in Kentucky,” said Jamie Haydon, president of Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation.

Keeneland is pledging the $100,000 over four years. The association’s vice president of equine safety, Dr. Stuart Brown, said PET imaging has been a focus in the thoroughbred industry for years.

“I think what it has done is given us the ability to look at a more in-depth way at what’s going on with that individual horse and give us the opportunity for rest,” Brown said.

Lengthening careers and preventing further injuries; including those that are catastrophic.

“By using this technology, we were able to definitively say this horse needs a break and we’re going to get that horse out of training and give it a few months off and that horse should come back good as new,” Garrett said.

PET scans also make imaging more efficient with the ability to scan all four legs in a half hour, compared to 45 minutes to scan one joint using MRI.

The Grayson Jockey Club Research Foundation has provided more than $40 million to fund nearly 430 projects at 45 universities across the globe since 1940.

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