Leonardo's Heart

Back in 2000, a mummified dinosaur was found in the hills of Montana. The story of the discovery can be found here.

What I found interesting in this story is the eventual use of a powerful Co-60 X-ray machine at the Johnson Space Center (it looks like they were at Ellington field because of the T-38s shown in the video) to look at the inside of Leonardo, the fossilized mummy. Most important, they actually had a scan at different angles but

....At one point, Kaye and Andersen decided to try something unique and created some stereo imagery from the 2D X-rays. While at Houston, Andersen built a special gantry that allowed the group to change the angle of the X-rays to achieve 3D convergent stereo pairs. “Unfortunately, we didn’t get enough of that done because each X-ray exposure took too long, and we couldn’t produce enough pairs,” says Kaye. However, the few that were available held promise for future applications in which CT scans are not possible....

I wonder if, provided the data is still available, it would not be a good challenge for the various compressive sensing derived CT reconstruction techniques ? I just asked Tom Kaye about this. We'll see.

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