Conservators from Phoebe A. Hearst Museum at UC Berkeley teamed up with Stanford physicists and clinicians to CT scan two Egyptian crocodile mummies that reside at the museum. Strangely, we’re not seeing a CT scanner but a Siemens AXIOM Artis clinical fluoroscope in the images. Stanford’s SCOPE blog, though, is reporting that the crocs were also put through a physics laboratory CT scanner that produces higher resolution images than clinical ones.
From Rebecca Fahrig, a Stanford physicist:
The scanner in my lab provides much higher resolution than the clinical CT scanner, on the order of 200 microns instead of 600 microns from the clinical scanner. It is possible to see smaller things using these C-arm CT images than using the clinical CT scanner. The system also provides another advantage – during the scanning process we get to see very high-resolution projection (or 2-D) images of the object being scanned. During the scanning of one of the crocodiles, we noticed something in the projection images from the C-arm system that we had not seen in the clinical CT images – a fish hook. We were then able to do a very high-resolution reconstruction of the fish hook, and see details about the shape and construction of the hook.
Read on at SCOPE…
More at Inside The Conservator’s Art: Wrapping things up: stabilizing a crocodile mummy and CT scanning crocodile mummies at Stanford
Flashbacks: 42,000 Year Old Baby Mammoth Gets CT, MRI Scanned ; Computed Tomography Images Ancient Egyptian Mummy; One of The Oldest Medical Mysteries May Have Been Solved; CT Suggests King Tutankhamen Died from an Infected Leg Wound; Siemens CT Scanner Reveals Contents of Bust of Nefertiti