Inside a Mummy

Reported December 2009

PALO ALTO (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- CT scans are used every day in hospitals and doctors' offices to detect heart problems and lung, liver and pancreatic cancers. Now the technology is being used to uncover mysteries 2,000 years old.

From the myth to reality, what’s inside a mummy intrigues most. Now, a new high-resolution CT scan at Stanford University can go inside the wrappings … without destroying what lies beneath.

"This was a mummy we weren’t allowed to touch," Paul Brown, a biocomputing expert at Stanford, told Ivanhoe.

Biocomputing experts -- who study biological applications of computers -- and medical physicists got a detailed look at a priest who died 2,600 years ago in ancient Egypt and had been stored in a museum for decades. The scan produced thousands of high-resolution, three-dimensional pictures.

"It's a high contrast CT scan, which is an experimental CT scan -- perfect for the mummy since the mummy doesn’t have any soft tissue," Brown said.

Graphic artists use images to put the mummy back together-piece by piece. The scans reveal the most detailed images of a mummy to date. This priest died in his 20s.

"You can see the calcification, and that’s one predictor of age," Brown said.

He was laid to rest with an amulet on his forehead, representing eternal life. His organs were placed in linen pouches and set inside his torso. Another scan of a child reveals even more mysteries.

"We think it’s a little girl," Brown said. "We could see the trauma. We could see a tooth that was cracked. We looked at every single bone in her body, and we didn’t find anything unusual. They think she was weaned late, and once she left her mothers milk, she probably died."

This same technology is being used to teach medical students in more detail than ever before.

"We can cut through the feet and we can look inside the bones," biology student Beverly Chang told Ivanhoe. "I can spin it around and look at different angles of the foot."

Sending real-time scans to doctors on their iPhones is also being tested -- giving them accessibility to their patients while the doctors are out of the office.

"Radiologists can look at a scan, see if there is a potential problem, and refer them on," graduate student Sara Hegmann said.

It's new technology, taking a look inside the past, and helping doctors in the future.

Each program is interactive and is already being used to teach medical and dental students. Soon, these same programs will be available to students in middle schools and high schools.

The Association of Physicists in Medicine and the Optical Society of America contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

W. Paul Brown, DDS, FICD, FACD
Palo Alto, CA 94304
(650) 854-4030
paul@biocomp.stanford.edu

Dr. Sudarshan Chamakuri
Medical Physicist
American Association of Physicists in Medicine
http://www.aapm.org
Radiationtherapy@hotmail.com

Optical Society of America
Washington, DC 20036-1023
(202) 223-8130
http://www.osa.org
info@osa.org

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