Adam Summers, a fish expert at the University of Washington, has been 3-D scanning fish for decades, but it was always a complicated and expensive undertaking. Getting access to the right equipment was a struggle, and each specimen would take nearly a day to process.
In late 2015, Friday Harbor Laboratories on San Juan Island acquired its own computed tomography scanner, and Summers’ team set out to achieve what had once seemed impossible: to create 3-D models of all 33,000 known fish species.
The technology Summers uses to create three-dimensional images of fish skeletons is a much smaller version of the same machine used in hospitals to do CT scans on humans. For decades, his method for scanning fish was much the same as that of the hospital radiology lab. |
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