MSCT unwraps mummy’s mysteries



Although it was archeologists who discovered the mummified remains of Harwa, an artisan who lived during the XXII or XXIII dynasty, it took multislice CT to put a face on the 3000-year-old Egyptian. An article in the September issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology describes Italian researchers' efforts to reconstruct the mummy's face with the aid of MSCT.CT data have been used in the past to virtually unwrap mummies and reconstruct 3D faces, but this is the first time MSCT was used for this purpose . It allowed for the accurate acquisition of thin overlapping slices, providing much finer detail than has been acquired in the past.“The only other way to have gotten the information we got from MSCT would have been to unwrap, destroy, and otherwise alter the conservation of the bandages and the mummy,” said lead author Dr. Federico Cesarani, of the Struttura Operative Complessa di Radiodiagnostica in Asti, Italy.The facial reconstruction was done in several steps. The researchers first acquired data from the mummy head using the following parameters:· helical scanning· 0.8-sec rotation time· 1.25-mm slice thickness· 7.5-mm/sec table speed· 0.7-mm reconstruction interval, large field-of-view· 120 kVp and 140mAsThey then put the data through postprocessing and used software to automatically reconstruct the head. Further processing allowed the investigators to virtually unwrap the bandages from the head, separating them from superficial dried tissues remaining on the mummy’s skull.Next, they generated a resin model of the head using a system that produces a physical model based on the computer-assisted design file of the object.Anthropologists and forensic artists added the finishing touches to the final model, based on information from the residual soft tissues as seen on the MSCT data. Details garnered from the data were so accurate the artists were able to reconstruct a mole on the left side of Harwa’s face.



Amazing things that can be done with CT these days never thought we radiologists wud be able to help solve Egypt's mysteries..