Slicing into the Past

Take a look—a careful look—and figure out what you are seeing. I am delighted to once again present a winning image from the Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, sponsored by the journal Science and the U. S. National Science Foundation, where for the fourth year I am privileged to be a judge. The moment this image came on the screen, we all sighed with wonder. We’re seeing the head region of a 2,000-year-old mummy of an Egyptian child (notice the head within the cartonnage?) from the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California. The detail is part of a larger three-dimensional image reconstructed from 60,000 exceptionally high-resolution two-dimensional scans, made without disturbing the fragile mummy-case. The team was led by endodontist W. Paul Brown of the StanfordNASA National Biocomputation Center, working with physicist Rebecca Fahrig in the Department of Radiology and other colleagues at the Stanford University School of Medicine.