Texas Equine Veterinary Association

• 21 • Technology Technology SerieS SerieS ABOUT THE AUTHOR Piper Norton, DVM, DACVIM Texas Equine Medical Associates Piper Norton is an ambulatory equine internist in the Austin area whose practice is both routine and consultant level medicine. She is the vice president of TEVA and serves as the editor of the remuda. If you have an app that brings you joy, please submit an article to the tech series! PlanT ID aPPlicaTionS PlanT ID aPPlicaTionS Remember the day when you first discovered Shazam? All you had to do was record a line of a song and the app gave you the artist and name of the song? Artificial intelligence soware has truly come a long way and is gathering data from numer- ous forums...we see it every day in the Facebook 10-year challenges. is soware is incredi- ble, giving you instant knowledge at your fingertips. Now you can take a picture of a plant and in less than 5 seconds, you can know the name of the plant. In addition, this app also identifies weeds, insects, birds, plant diseases, and my favorite feature, a plant that may be toxic. Recently, I was consulting on a farm that had several cases of colic in the last month. In an hour, I was able to name all the plants and trees in the pasture. en, I was able to add these plants to "my garden" and, from there, I researched each plant. Although the app suggests when a plant has toxic principles, I wanted to en- sure that I had gathered reliable data. In research- ing the plants in "my garden," the app correctly identified 19 of the 20 possibly toxic plants. I was able to quickly share the data with the client and the local agriculture supply store to ensure that they can eradicate the poisonous plants. ere are several apps that can identify plants however they aren't all created equal. e Journal of Medical Toxicology recently published an article entitled "Swipe Right: a Comparison of Accuracy of Plant Identification Apps for Toxic Plants." In this article, Picture is had the high- est accuracy of correctly identifying toxic plants. Even though it "won the battle of the apps" at 60%, the human brain still usually wins. Otter J, Mayer S, Tomaszewski CA. Swipe Right: a Comparison of Accuracy of Plant Identifica- tion Apps for Toxic Plants. J Med Toxicol. 2021 Jan;17(1):42-47. doi: 10.1007/s13181-020-00803- 6. Epub 2020 Aug 13. PMID: 32794048; PMCID: PMC7785603.

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