The University of Guelph’s Ontario Veterinary College (OVC) in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, has unveiled plans to build a new multi-million-dollar Equine Performance Centre, dedicated to diagnosing and treating problems in performance horses. The facility is designed to rival those of the New Bolton Centre, Cornell University, University of California/Davis, and other top-notch equine diagnostic centers in North America.

“The idea of a Performance Centre is to bring together a broad variety of diagnostic techniques and abilities in one place,” said Chris Brown, DVM, acting director of the University of Guelph’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital. “We need to have a facility separate from the actual hospital for these otherwise healthy horses who are being examined for loss-of-performance issues.”

Creating the Equine Performance Centre will be a five- to 10-year project with several phases. The first is underway–a building adjacent to the existing large animal hospital to house eastern Canada’s first veterinary magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) unit, scheduled to open in autumn 2004. “Guelph will be one of only two places in the world with an MRI unit with this level of sophistication,” Brown said, “the other being at the Animal Health Trust in Newmarket, England.”

The $5-million (Canadian) new installation “will be usable on all animal species,” says Brown. “We anticipate that dogs will be the most frequent MRI recipients, but we have designed the space specifically with horses in mind. There’ll be an equine induction and recovery stall adjacent to the magnet, so we won’t have to anesthetize horses in the large animal hospital and wheel them all the way down the hall