Big Cat Scanner

摘要

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. Vets at the institute, which sees patients from several zoos in the region, used to rely on handheld ultrasound units-good for details, bad on the big picture. Now they've acquired a $1.4 million Toshiba Aquilion CX CT scanner mod-ded with a table used to support obese human patients (up to 661 pounds!). It'll capture 4,000 images in 30 seconds and assemble the slices into a 3-D whole. "The new scanner transforms the body into a virtual object," says the institute's Thomas Hil-debrandt.