Based in Great Britain, and with an active office in the USA, Hallmarq Veterinary Imaging is the pioneer corporation that brought MRI to the horse world. The firm has installed over 150 systems worldwide and compiled more than 18,000 case records of lower limbs and hooves of horses of all breeds, sports, and ages.

In the past decade, "standing MRI" technology has been developed to continually improve diagnostic precision for soft-tissue foot lameness in horses. We're here to help you understand how MRI works and to share insight about specific hoof injuries.

MRI stands for "magnetic resonance imaging". Now common in humans, it took a massive effort to figure out how to obtain an image of an injured horse, and Hallmarq led the way with a system that not only allowed the horse to be imaged standing upright and bearing weight on the limb, but also negating the need to put the horse under anesthesia, thus avoiding all its associated risks.

As MRI becomes available in more veterinary hospitals around the world, it's important to know what veterinary radiologists and lameness-specialist veterinarians are looking at when they examine the images that result from an MRI session.

Hallmarq MRI hopes that the images in this Flickr file will help everyone in the veterinary and horse-owning worlds, including students, learn about the technology and the resulting images. You may not be able to "read" MRIs but you will appreciate the incredible anatomical structures of the horse's foot and Hallmarq MRI's ability to reveal tiny flaws and irregularities that may be the root of the horse's pain or gait abnormality.

Hallmarq MRI invites anyone interested to visit our main web site, "friend" us on Facebook, or "follow" us on Twitter as we bring technology out of the lab and share it with you. Please add Hallmarq MRI as a Flickr contact and let us know how you like our images and what uses you find for them.