TAYLOR YAW: The Great Ape Project is something that we participated in for a lot of years. It formally started in 2010 and is actually one of the reasons why I'm a veterinarian today. I started out as a zookeeper, and I remember as a zookeeper seeing the Great Ape Project, the cardiologist, and all the different specialists coming in to help. And it really kind of got me excited about veterinary medicine. 

Not only are we doing the examination, but also getting this echocardiogram. The echocardiogram will be sent off to the Great Ape Project that's based at the Detroit Zoo. And it's basically just a collaboration. It's a bunch of specialists bringing together pathologists, diagnosticians to really help us figure out why great apes get cardiac disease. 

WALKER THOMAS: They're building a database for all these gorillas so we can actually set parameters of what's normal for a gorilla heart. We have that information for humans, but we don't have all that information for gorillas, or we're making it more robust. So that way, we have standards to go by to say, yes, the heart is abnormal or, yes, the heart is normal.