ABSTRACT
Diagnostic imaging (radiology) is applied frequently around the world in captive and free-ranging marine mammals in order to help with health status screening, diagnosis of disease, and monitoring of response to therapy in live animals. While its use in live animals needs no explanation, diagnostic imaging has also been used postmortem to help determine cause of death (St. Leger et al. 2011; Danil et al. 2014). Imaging modalities that have been utilized in marine mammals include ultrasound, radiography (survey and contrast), computed tomography (CT), diagnostic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), MRI spectrography, functional MRI (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), nuclear scintigraphy, and single positron emission computed tomography (SPECT). At this time fMRI, MRI spectrography, and nuclear medicine are more frequently used in clinical and physiological research than as a diagnostic tool (Houser et al. 2004; Smith et al. 2010; Cook et al. 2015). Regardless of the imaging modality being used, a thorough understanding of the normal imaging anatomy is needed to determine when genuine pathology is present (Dennison and Schwarz 2008; Dennison, Forrest, and Gulland 2009; Montie et al. 2009; Ivančić, Solano and Smith 2014).
