CT, MRI and X-Rays of famous baby mammoth.

Think your baby ultrasound was revealing? Recently, a 42,000 year-old baby woolly mammoth got it's latest health-check scan thanks to GE Healthcare using their state of the art medical equipment.



Lyuba (pronounced Lee-OO-bah) was discovered in 2007 by a reindeer herder in northwestern Siberia, and is considered the best-preserved mammoth ever discovered. As Tom Swerski, Project Manager of Exhibitions of The Field Museum, says, “A lot of the information Lyuba can provide is not visible on the surface, so to be able to see things through a CT scan or an MRI which show her internal organs and the structure beneath her skin is really important.”

In collaboration with the International Mammoth Committee (IMC) and The Field Museum collaborated to bring Lyuba to the GE Healthcare Institute in Waukesha, WI where she was to be imaged on three different systems.

For the tech geeks among us, she was first scanned on the Discovery CT750 HD, a 64-slice, high definition CT scanner. Second, she was imaged on the Innova® 4100IQ, a three-dimensional digital X-ray system. Finally, Lyuba was scanned on a high performance open MRI system, the Signa OpenSpeed EXCITE 0.7T, to view her soft tissue including the brain, liver and heart.

The scientists studying Lyuba also have been trying to determine what caused her death. As best as they can tell, she became trapped in a mud hole and inadvertently ingested mud. With these incredible CT scans, the scientists now have evidence of silt in her trunk and in her lungs that confirm her cause of death as accidental suffocation. With this, scientists reconfirmed that Lyuba was not ill or poorly developed.