AssetID: 54115812
Headline: UNCAPTIONED: Australian Scientists Using AI To Unlock Fossils' Secrets
Caption: Australian Scientists Using AI To Unlock Fossils' Secrets. Scientists are using AI to unlock the mysteries of the fossils that tell us huge amounts about the Earth's prehistoric past. Queensland Museum and James Cook University scientists have developed an AI-based technique that speeds up the analysis of fossils from months to just days as outlined in their recent scientific paper Accelerating segmentation of fossil CT scans through Deep Learning. Queensland Museum palaeontologist and JCU Senior Lecturer Dr Espen Knutsen says: “CT scanning provides palaeontologists with a way to look inside bone and study fragile fossil material without the need for physically removing the surrounding rock”. However, until now, importing the scanned datasets manually into a computer to produce a 3D model was a laborious process - taking months. Now AI can complete the job in just days - as they manually segmented around two per cent of 2000 image slices and used these to train a Deep Learning model which completed the task. “We achieved a highly precise 3D representation of a tiny Triassic reptile from Queensland that was around 240 million-years-old. This was completed in days rather than months,” Dr Knutsen said. Their breakthrough will allow far easier study of each fossil's secrets, enabling us to understand the dinosaurs and other animals that roamed our planet millions of years ago.
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