Source: USA Today

Brute, a German Shepherd, lay anesthetized on an operating table, his hairy chest under a plastic cover and his powerful paws taped immobile.

"Here comes the wire up the artery!" said Dr. Chick Weisse, who infused the dog's cancerous liver with chemotherapy via a catheter at the century-old Animal Medical Center in Manhattan in an effort to "buy him some time."

Brute was home in days, the cancer at bay a while longer - perhaps eight months. The cost: $2,000.

Around the nation, veterinarians are practicing ever more advanced medicine on the nation's 77 million dogs, 90 million cats and a myriad of other animals. The driving force is "the changing role of the pet in our society," said Dr. Patty Khuly, a veterinarian at Miami's Sunset Animal Clinic.

The bottom line for many people, she said, is that investing in a pet's life "improves the quality of a human life immeasurably more than, say, buying a luxury car."

In a radiation suite at the Animal Medical Center, a black cat named Muka was undergoing a CT scan for a lung problem. A medical team hovered over the tranquilized animal, injecting contrast dye and poring over digital readouts to diagnose the problem: chronic pleural fibrosis.

The new, half-million-dollar Toshiba Aquilion - one of the latest, fastest 3D imaging scanners - was a gift from an owner whose pet was saved at the AMC, a not-for-profit research and teaching facility. The AMC offers 24-hour emergency care using once-unthinkable procedures like heart surgeries, MRIs and ultrasounds. It has a staff of 81 vets, including 27 certified in fields such as radiology, endoscopy, neurology, cardiology and oncology.

They train 18 interns and 24 residents, including two from Italy and one from Croatia this year.

Khuly, who has an MBA and a veterinary degree from the University of Pennsylvania, says more people have come to believe that investing in their pets' health enriches their own lives. And that, she says, has prompted young vets to enter specialty medicine.

Though many Americans don't get the kind of care their pets do, there are often no limits to what they'll do to save the animals - spending $12 billion last year paying veterinary bills, according to The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. That's about double what owners spent a decade earlier.

In some cases, advanced medicine perfected on pets leads to procedures then applied to humans.

The AMC says animals' painful arthritic joints are now being healed with stem cell transplants not yet approved for humans. The cost: $4,000.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, a new surgical technique to repair torn knee ligaments in dogs was so successful that it's now being used on NFL players, said Dr. William Gengler, director of Wisconsin's Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital.

Wisconsin also pioneered treating cancers in animals with TomoTherapy - image-guided radiation that targets only the tumor, sparing surrounding tissue. That's achieved by pinpointing the diseased tissue with a 360-degree CT scanner, then opening radiation windows precisely at the needed location, Gengler said.