How does laser scanning differ from 3D medical scanning?
A. There are many kinds of medical scanners. Computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) scanning are two well-known examples. These two technologies are similar in some ways to laser scanning. All three take multiple views of the object, and all three create a 3D computer model. However, lasers see only the outside surface of an object, and must work around obstructions (what we call occlusions), while CT and MR can see through these obstructions, allowing a reconstruction of the outside and the inside of the object. In principle, Michelangelo’s statues could be scanned with CT or MR. However, CT and MR scanners and big, expensive, and not very portable. Ironically, as big as they are, they are not big enough to scan any of Michelangelo’s statues. Even if you removed his statues from their bases, you couldn’t fit them through the circular hole in the center of the scanner. I might add that our spatial resolution is higher than most CT or MR machines, and our scanning techniqu
