Dr. Tony Pease, DACVR, is the head radiologist at the Veterinary Teaching Hospital which was recently remodelled and is now home to the largest diameter MRI machine at a university in the country. The machine allows doctors to take images of larger portions of animals, including horses. Pease said the machine has revolutionized what we teach our vet students and what we can image of animals.
After almost five years and nearly $3 million, MSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine’s newest research tool makes the school the leader of the pack in veterinary diagnostic imaging.
A magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, machine capable of scanning a larger portion of large animals, such as horses and cows, allows veterinarians to capture and study more images of an animal’s body, said Anthony Pease, the section head of diagnostic imaging. The machine arrived in July.
“The MRI will help not only further veterinary medicine, but it’s a translational idea where we are able to do what we do in animals and help people at the same time,” Pease said. “We are able to make diagnoses in animals when we didn’t even think they had these diseases.”
Veterinarians used the MRI to study its first client, a horse with a brain tumor in its pituitary gland Aug. 3, Pease said.
The MRI is the first of its kind at an academic institution and one of three in the U.S. Private practices own the other two, Pease said.
Although MSU’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital already used imaging technology such as a CT scanner for animal diagnostics, school officials said the large MRI was crucial to moving MSU forward as a veterinary leader.
“The dean of the college, as well as the hospital and administration, had enough foresight to realize that to just get what everybody else had and to go with the status quo is not what MSU stands for,” Pease said. “MSU, without the magnetic imagining systems, is missing a very crucial part.”
A main difference between most hospital MRIs and the MRI housed at MSU is a larger opening and a shorter bore, or the machine’s length. The 70-centimeter opening of MSU’s MRI is about 50 percent larger than a standard model, Pease said.
College of Veterinary Medicine Dean Christopher Brown said as veterinary diagnostic imagining became more common among institutions across the U.S., MSU began to slip behind its competition.
“We, as an institution, did in fact fall a bit behind,” Brown said. “Now, we’ve moved into the front-end of the field.”
Charles DeCamp, the chairperson of the Department of Small Animal Clinical Sciences, said the MRI won’t just be used for large animals and could benefit cat and dog owners as well.
“The organization has been working in this direction for seven or eight years,” DeCamp said. “It’s a very expensive project and very detailed. Everything had to be right and we wanted it to not be just for small animals, but large animals as well.”
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