A "scanner" has been developed in Japan designed to be used on COWS.
It is designed to look at the difference between fat and muscle.
The machine can be used to see if steak has enough marbling to make it juicy..
Marbled steak cooked properly in Japan is highly sought after.
Cost?
"While there isn’t a timeframe for commercialization of the product yet, Mr. Nakashima projected that it could be ready in a couple of years, and for a price of ¥20 million ($166,000) to ¥40 million once the institute finds a partner company to build the machine."
What else could such a device be good for?
Non-invasively detecting PROSTATE CANCER:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24172787
ADC mapping is the most effective standard MR imaging tool for detecting prostate cancer.
What technique is used?
Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging.
Reference for the tool to be used on Cattle:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25937706
Abstract
Non-invasive in vivo marbling quantification helps owners to choose the optimum nutritional management for growing cattle and buyers to more precisely evaluate grown cattle at auctions.
When using time-domain proton nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) relaxometry, it is possible to quantify muscle and fat separately by taking advantage of the difference in the spin-spin relaxation time (T2) between water molecules in muscles and fat molecules, which would contribute to the non-invasive and objective determination of marbling scores.
With this in mind, we developed a prototype NMR scanner (4.1 MHz for protons) using an original single-sided magnetic circuit and a plane radio frequency (RF) coil for use in the non-invasive quantification of water and fat in live cattle.
The sensed region of the developed scanner is compact and almost cubical (19 × 19 × 16 mm3) while the investigation depth (the distance from the RF coil to the center of the sensed region) has been lengthened to 30 mm, which is sufficient for the in vivo trapezius muscle measurement of live cattle.
What else could such a scanner be used for? Tumor detection? Myleoma? Deep tissue aneurysm?
==THREAD POST CLARIFICATION==
This thread is not for discussing COWS, different types of bovines, or how to make massaged meat. IT is NOT about VEGAN discussions, nor is it about using a magnetic wand metal detector to check somebody's anatomy.
The discussion is about a hand held scanner, using the MR system. Which is a high resolution imaging system when the appropriate imaging techniques are used.