This article was taken from the May 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Doing diagnostics on zoo animals isn't easy. They can't tell you where it hurts, and at least a few of them look at a vet and think "lunch". But a new CT scanner at Berlin's Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research is making the process a little easier.
The institute has acquired a $1.4 million (£850,000) Toshiba Aquilion CX CT scanner, modded with a reinforced table normally used to support obese human patients (it can take up to 300 kilograms). The scanner can capture 4,000 images in 30 seconds and assembles the slices into a 3D whole. "The scanner transforms the body into a virtual object," says the institute's group leader, Thomas Hildebrandt. All kinds of patients are benefitting: the scanner detected water in the lungs of an Amazonian fish called an arapaima, for example -- a pretty neat trick, since the two-metre-long air-breathing beast has four lungs, and one set obscures the next.
In fact, the images are so good that Hildebrandt is hoping to exhibit them. Considering that the only other way to see the inside of a tiger is to get swal- lowed by one, 3D scans seem like a good alternative.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
