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A computed tomography (CT) scanner allows scientists and veterinarians to look inside animals without cutting them open. It is also hoped that the device will replace "gut decisions" on whether to euthanize animals that are diseased or injured.

The Berlin zoo's leopard Ninja was 24, a ripe old age for a big cat, when he departed for the happy hunting ground. For scientists, however, he has become immortal.

The first ultramodern CT scanner for wild animals has produced images of Ninja's fearsomely toothed head. The images can now be studied by scientists around the world.

Berlin's Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) recently held the first public demonstration of the device, worth about a million euros (about 1.25 million dollars). The patient: a Borneo tortoise thought to have swallowed a fish hook.

A painted picture of a zebra on the facade of the IZW building, by the entrance, is a sign to visitors that things are wild inside. Behind the door to one of the rooms lies a man-made desert: a glass terrarium inhabitveterined by naked mole rats serving science.

The new CT scanner is in the room opposite. It has become a lifesaver for the odd-looking rodents, also known as sand puppies. Scientists used to have to kill them on occasion in order to examine them. Now many are simply scanned.

IZW veterinarian Guido Fritsch regards the new technology highly. "We used to have to cut open an animal to look inside," he said. Now the scanner looks inside.

Long used in human medicine, computed tomography, which combines a series of x-ray views taken from many different angles to produce cross-sectional images of bones and soft tissues, has come to help diseased and injured animals as well.

CT scans of dogs and cats have become routine at Berlin's Free University (FU), where some wild animals have also been scanned. But creatures such as elephants, lions, hippos and bears are often too large and heavy for scans, and CT technology in use at the FU is comparatively slow.

The IZW's new CT scanner can produce a tomogram of an animal weighing up to 300 kilograms in seconds. One recent visitor to the institute was Jamuna Toni, a 6-month-old elephant from Munich's zoo. To its handlers' sorrow, it had to be put down because it could no longer move. A CT scan confirmed their suspicions: the elephant suffered from a malignant bone disease.

A CT analysis is to help determine the exact cause of the disease. Was a genetic defect to blame? Time is short because Jamuna Toni's mother is pregnant again.

"A CT evaluation makes it easier for us to decide whether to put down an ill animal," said Thomas Hildebrandt, the IZW's chief veterinarian. "It gives us objective criteria that we previously lacked. Before, we usually made a gut decision."

Computed tomography can shorten the suffering of animals that are seriously ill, Hildebrandt added. And tomograms make it easier to develop surgical strategies for animals amenable to therapy.

Following a CT scan, fantastic images appear on the monitor at the IZW. Rotatable three-dimensional pictures of Ninja's skull bones come into view. Tongue, larynx and trachea can be depicted in colour, and the brain is displayed in wafer-thin cross-sections.

The IZW waited five years for the scanner, which was installed a year earlier than planned thanks to an economic stimulus package approved by Germany's federal government. The government paid the high purchase price and a cooperation agreement with the device's manufacturer helps to keep operating expenses down.

"Wildlife research" is defined broadly by the IZW. Not long ago, Daniela Schwarz-Wings, a palaeontologist at the Berlin Museum of Natural History, brought over 40 bamboo corsets filled with dinosaur bones. About 150 million years old, the bones were unearthed in 1910 by a German expedition in what is now Tanzania. The smallest of the bones that the Germans found were wrapped in bamboo for protection during transport.

No-one has opened the tightly bound packages for a century because the museum is short of space. Schwarz-Wings always wondered what was inside, though, and a tomogram told her: the cervical rib of a brachiosaurus, and the spine and fibula of a gazelle-like dinosaur. Now she wants to open some of the packages, saying the bones would be a nice addition to the museum's collection.

The IZW's Hildebrandt hopes to solve a number of riddles with the help of the CT scanner. For example how do elephants perceive sound waves in the ground with their feet and trunk? Why don't rare wild animals like pandas get pregnant in Berlin's zoo?

His colleague Fritsch would not mind if Berliners made CT-scan appointments for ill pets. But they need be forewarned: A visit would cost them several hundred euros.

Source: Berlin research institute