New CT scan tech shows individual cells in mummy’s hand

It's really difficult for archaeologists to study ancient objects such as mummies without damaging the remains. In order to ease this, scientists have now made a unique CT scan technology that shows scans in such depth that even cells and blood vessels will be visible.

A revolutionary CT scan technique has made possible to look in detail inside a 2,500-year-old ancient mummy’s hand including the blood vessels under the fingernails. The mummy imaged was of a man who lived in ancient Egypt in 400BC.

The final image resolution was between six to nine micrometers, a bit more than the width of a human blood cell. With such a high resolution, scientists were able to see the remains of separate cells, blood vessels, nerves, and different layers of skin, as per Daily Mail.

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They used a technique known as propagation-based phase-contrast imaging, which showed contrast between less-dense materials such as soft tissues. The researchers first scanned the entire hand and then carried out a detailed scan of the tip of the middle finger.

“There is a risk of missing traces of diseases only preserved within the soft tissue if only absorption-contrast imaging is used. With phase-contrast imaging, however, the soft tissue structures can be imaged down to cellular resolution, which opens up the opportunity for detailed analysis of the soft tissues,” said researcher Jenny Romell.

Publishing the study in the journal Radiology, Romell expressed that now because of the amazing results with the help of this CT scan technology, ancient tissues ‘can be imaged in a way that we have never seen before’, wrote Futurism.

For the future, Romell hopes that the phase-contrast CT ‘will find its way to the medical researchers and archaeologists who have long struggled to retrieve information from soft tissues’. She believes that a widespread use of this method will lead way to new discoveries in palaeopathology.