Children's high-tech scanner to examine museum's mummy

Visitors to Cincinnati Museum Center's "Mummies of the World: The Exhibition" will soon know more about the life story behind a Peruvian child mummy, thanks to cutting-edge medical technology at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.

On Wednesday, Dr. Brian Coley, radiologist-in-chief at Children's Hospital, and Dr. Heather Gill-Frerking, director of science and education for "Mummies of the World," will perform a "virtual autopsy" on the child mummy. The mummy will undergo a 3D CT scan, a procedure never before conducted on a human mummy at Children's Hospital.

The three-dimensional data obtained from a one-minute x-ray scan will provide image data that can be displayed as CT scan slices through the mummy at various angles, and as images of the mummy's surface. Bone can be separated from other tissues, providing images of the skeleton. It should enable researchers to determine the sex of the child and may identify evidence of disease or injury.

"The information will also be used for academic research, and will be provided to Cincinnati Museum Center for archive records and for any future exhibitions that may include this mummy," said Dr. Gill-Frerking.

Museum Center officials say that little is known about this mummy, which dates from roughly 1450 and is on loan from the San Diego Museum of Man.

"It does show evidence of artificial cranial modification. Many South American cultures believed that a long, narrow head was beautiful, leading them to bind the skulls from birth to form them," said Cody Hefner of Cincinnati Museum Center.

The results from the CT scan conducted at Children's will later be revealed during "Mummies of the World: The Exhibition," which is on display at Cincinnati Museum Center until April 2015.