The Reconstruction That Showed The Weapon

The 2023 Science Advances paper, also led by the Waters group and including collaborators from multiple institutions, reported the results of the most technically sophisticated analysis yet applied to the Manis rib specimen.

The approach began with the high-resolution CT data that had been collected during the earlier work.

Each fragment visible in the CT images was digitally segmented — isolated from the surrounding rib bone and from each other in the three-dimensional data set — and converted into a digital model that represented the three-dimensional surface of that fragment alone.

Digital segmentation of CT data is a labor-intensive process, requiring the researcher to trace the boundaries of each object of interest in the CT image stack — slice by slice, frame by frame — and assign each identified region to the appropriate category.