The purpose of this paper was to describe the interests of MRI in the diagnosis of equine locomotor disorders and to present its future developments in equine medicine. MRI images allow the identification of bone lesions with a great accuracy, even if there is no associated radiographic abnormality. Compared with ultrasonography, MRI permits to image all the soft tissues of the equine foot and can distinguish within? a lesion different types of tissue which have the same echogenicity. Nevertheless only the distal part of the limbs (including the carpus and the tarsus), the head and the cranial part of the neck can be imaged for an adult horse with the current MRI machines. Moreover, high quality images require to place the horse under general anaesthesia. To overcome this limitation, one MRI machine allowing the examination of the distal parts of the limbs on a standing horse has been developed and improves regularly. Equine MRI should also benefit from the improvements in human imaging particularly with machines allowing: the examination of larger body areas and the detailed architectural and biochemical evaluations of tissues.