The Associated Press
SEATTLE—University of Washington biology professor Adam Summers no longer has to coax hospital staff to use their CT scanners so he can visualize the inner structures of sting ray and other fish.
Last fall, he installed a small computed tomography, or CT, scanner at the UW’s Friday Harbor Laboratories on San Juan Island in Washington state and launched an ambitious project to scan and digitize all of more than 25,000 species in the world.
The idea is to have one clearinghouse of CT scan data freely available to researchers anywhere to analyze the morphology, or structure, of particular species.
So far, Summers and others have digitized images of more than 500 species—from poachers to sculpins—from museum collections around the globe.
He plans to add thousands more, and has invited other scientists to use the CT scanner or add their own scans to the open-access database.
“We have folks coming from all over the world to use this machine,” said Summers, who advised Pixar on how fish move for its hit animated films “Finding Nemo” and “Finding Dory,” and is dubbed “fabulous fish guy” on the credits for “Nemo.”
He raised $340,000 to buy the CT scanner in November.
Like those used in hospitals, it takes X-ray images from various angles and combines them to create three-dimensional images of the fish.
With each CT scan he posted to the Open Science Framework, a sharing website, people would ask him, “What are you going to scan next?”
He would respond: “I want to scan them all. I want to scan all fish.”
Then he developed techniques, such as scanning multiple specimens, that made the goal within reach, he noted.
And suddenly a project that easily could have taken 50 years boiled down to just a few.
“It wasn’t just a joke anymore,” Summers said. “We could actually say it and have a hope of actually getting every fish scanned.”
Scans typically cost $500-$2,000 each but Summers’ project provides free access to scans.
