Article Summary:

A paper in the journal PLoS ONE entitled “The Digital Fish Library: Using MRI to Digitize, Database, and Document the Morphological Diversity of Fish” describes how researchers are using MRI scanners to obtain non-invasive 3D scans of the soft tissue anatomy of an array of fishes preserved in the Marine Vertebrate Collection of Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The need for this has been identified as obtaining access to specimens for research is not always practical and frequently conflicts with the need to maintain the physical integrity of specimens.

The images of the high-resolution, high-contrast scans of the soft tissue anatomy of over 300 marine and freshwater species, can be viewed and accessed for research purposes on the Digital Fish Library.