When Nes-Hor and Nes-Min, two ancient Egyptian mummies, arrived at Keck Hospital of USC on the morning of Jan. 17, Summer Decker was determined to uncover as much detail as possible beneath their linen shrouds.
Decker — the Grace Whisler Professor of Medicine and professor of clinical radiology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC — chose the hospital’s most advanced CT scanner, which captures 320 cross-sectional image “slices” per rotation, for the job. To ensure the highest resolution, she programmed the slices to be as thin as the machine would allow: half a millimeter, the width of a grain of sand.
She didn’t have a lot of time: The mummies had been transported to the hospital from the California Science Center in Exposition Park, where they were to be displayed in Mummies of the World: The Exhibition when it opened Feb. 7. On the day of the CT scans, the mummies needed to be back at the California Science Center by 1 p.m. for installation into their displays.
That left Decker’s team just a few hours to glean knowledge concealed for more than 2,200 years. “I had my phone in my hand looking at the timing, making sure that we were capturing everything we could, because once they sealed them into that exhibit, they were off-limits to us,” Decker says. “This was our one shot at it” …
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