ABSTRACT
In this essay, I summarize a few ideas inspired by my involvement in the "Coronavation" working group, which spanned 2020's COVID-19 crisis. Health-care practitioners, computer scientists, and engineers alike, we strive to meet the challenges associated with practice under threat of pandemic with the same ideals driving the rapid, positive developments in health care today: innovation, collaboration and technology convergence, and acquisition of valuable data that leads to better approaches and new ideas. The ideas sketched here, forged by the need for practical pandemic responses, are rooted in those ideals.
Subject(s)
Biomedical Engineering , COVID-19 , Data Science , Humans , Machine Learning , Pandemics , SARS-CoV-2 , Surgical Procedures, OperativeABSTRACT
The noninvasive digital restoration of ancient texts written in carbon black ink and hidden inside artifacts has proven elusive, even with advanced imaging techniques like x-ray-based micro-computed tomography (micro-CT). This paper identifies a crucial mistaken assumption: that micro-CT data fails to capture any information representing the presence of carbon ink. Instead, we show new experiments indicating a subtle but detectable signature from carbon ink in micro-CT. We demonstrate a new computational approach that captures, enhances, and makes visible the characteristic signature created by carbon ink in micro-CT. This previously "unseen" evidence of carbon inks, which can now successfully be made visible, is a discovery that can lead directly to the noninvasive digital recovery of the lost texts of Herculaneum.
Subject(s)
Ink , Writing , X-Ray Microtomography , Carbon , Imaging, Three-Dimensional , Neural Networks, ComputerABSTRACT
Computer imaging techniques are commonly used to preserve and share readable manuscripts, but capturing writing locked away in ancient, deteriorated documents poses an entirely different challenge. This software pipeline-referred to as "virtual unwrapping"-allows textual artifacts to be read completely and noninvasively. The systematic digital analysis of the extremely fragile En-Gedi scroll (the oldest Pentateuchal scroll in Hebrew outside of the Dead Sea Scrolls) reveals the writing hidden on its untouchable, disintegrating sheets. Our approach for recovering substantial ink-based text from a damaged object results in readable columns at such high quality that serious critical textual analysis can occur. Hence, this work creates a new pathway for subsequent textual discoveries buried within the confines of damaged materials.
