Together with other members of the Data Science Research Group (DSRG) at the University of Malta, in collaboration with the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in France, we have recently been awarded a €100,000 grant to research methods for automatically segmenting microtomography images of Egyptian mummies. The official announcement can be found on the University’s Newspoint. We shall soon be issuing a call for applications for a post-doc to work with us on this problem; I’ll update this blog post with a link once the call is out.

By way of introduction, microtomography is an X-ray imaging technique similar to the medical CT scanner, and can be used to visualize the internal structures of objects in a non-invasive and non-destructive way. However, microtomography uses synchrotron radiation, an extremely powerful source of X-rays. This allows scans at much higher resolution and quality. Thanks to the phase contrast effect, it can…