Start of the VetAnaLog Project

Created on October 01, 2026

2026

I’m happy to share that on 1 October 2026, the VetAnaLog project officially started! The proposal, which I submitted as Project Lead, was accepted by the Hasler Stiftung in summer 2026.

This is a project I’m incredibly passionate about, because it is intended to fill a gap I have experienced first hand back when I worked as a veterinarian.

Still today, it is standard in the industry that patient vital monitoring during anaesthesia is recorded on paper. At a clinic like the Universitäres Tierspital Zürich with around 4,650 surgeries per year, this results in approximately 130,000 manual records every single year. The administrative burden is huge, but so is the promise of an automated solution.

The VetAnaLog project aims to:

  • collect monitor-derived anaesthesia vitals,
  • facilitate logging of intra-procedural events and medications, and
  • provide an automated, structured anaesthesia report draft from the resulting timeline.

Additionally, it aims to collect the first machine-learning-ready veterinary anaesthesia cohort, combining physiological timelines, timestamped interventions, medications and clinician-validated outcomes.

This project is a collaboration between:

  • Sarah Rebecca Meyer, Software Engineering Group, University of Bern (Project Lead)
  • Sebastiano Panichella, Software Engineering Group, University of Bern & IDeaLS Lab, The Italian Institute of Artificial Intelligence (AI4I) (software engineering & generative AI)
  • Regula Bettschart-Wolfensberger, Vetsuisse Faculty, University of Zurich (veterinary anaesthesia & clinical supervision)

I am also very happy that a junior team member has joined me on the project, and I’m looking forward to building VetAnaLog together.

Many thanks also to Prof. Timo Kehrer for hosting the project within the Software Engineering Group at the University of Bern.

Many thanks to the Dean of the Vetsuisse Faculty, University of Zurich, for the kind congratulations.