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Thursday, October 13, 2011

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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2 comments:

  1. Dear Igor,
    Did something very much like this long ago:

    Jaman, K.A., R. Gordon & R.M. Rangayyan (1985). Display of 3D anisotropic data from limited-view computed tomography. Computer Vision, Graphics, Image Processing 30(3), 345-361.

    Abstract: Methods are developed for producing 3-dimensional dispIays of anisotropic data arising from a series of limited-view computed tomograms. Volume data are formed by stacking 2-dimensional images reconstructed from projections from as few as three angles. We specify a slab of the volume from which parallel-ray proJection images are produced. Two reproJection images are made in directions separated by a small angle. These form a stereo pair and when viewed together give an illusion of depth (3D display). By taking viewing angles near the angles used for the initial (data) proJections, a few sharp, 3-dimensional views into the volume are obtained despite the anisotropy of the reconstruction. Also it is shown how image quality varies with the angle of view and thickness of the region.

    Yours, -Dick Gordon gordonr@cc.umanitoba.ca

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