A modern approach to the diagnosis of artistic heritage makes use of non-destructive techniques which avoid damage to artworks or signs of interaction with the analytical technique used. For this reason, today, the employment of X-rays to study artistic heritage is quite widespread. Computed tomography (CT) Imaging was first used as specialized medical diagnostic tool in the early 1970s. Today, CT scanners have become more common, and non-destructive three-dimensional imaging has found an increasing number of uses in different areas such as materials research, geology, archaeology, and museum conservation. In this work, a new generation of clinical CT (based on the Dual Energy and multi-slice acquisition principle) is used to investigate an Egyptian wooden mummy board with a total acquisition time of 93.23 seconds and a voxel size of 0.078 × 0.078 × 1.5 mm. The use of two distinct techniques of image post-processing, the two-dimensional multi-planar reconstruction (MPR) and the three-dimensional volume rendering technique (VRT) allowed us to: evaluate the state of conservation of the mummy board, determine how the wooden object was implemented, recognize a nineteenth-century intervention of consolidation, and advance the hypothesis that the wooden planks were reused. In particular, we highlight the use of the cardiovascular and pulmonary filter with VRT reconstruction, which allows a virtual elimination of different parts of the mummy board to investigate those areas otherwise accessible only by removing parts of the board and thus damaging the work. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

In cultural heritage conservation science, moisture content (MC) is an essential factor to determine. At the same time, it is essential to choose non-destructive and non-invasive approaches for more sustainable investigations and make them safe for the environment and the sample. The question addressed in this work concerns the possibility and the opportunity to investigate waterlogged wood by using nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) clinical scanners to carry out non-destructive volumetric diagnostics. In this study, MRI, the most important non-invasive medical imaging technique for human tissue analysis, was applied to study archaeological waterlogged wood samples. This type of archaeological material has a very high moisture content (400%–800%), thus, it is an ideal investigative subject for MRI which detects water molecules inside matter. By following this methodology, it was possible to obtain information about water content and conservation status through a T₁, T₂, and T₂* weighted image analysis, without any sampling or handling, and the samples were directly scanned in the water where they were stored. Furthermore, it permited processing 3D reconstruction, which could be an innovative tool for the digitalization of marine archaeological collections. In this work, 16 modern species of wood and a waterlogged archaeological wood sample were studied and investigated using a clinical NMR scanner operating at 3T. The results were compared with X-ray computed tomography (CT) images, as they had already been used for dendrochronology. The comparison highlights the similar, different, and complementary information about moisture content and conservation status in an all-in-one methodology obtainable from both MRI and CT techniques.

Clinical multislice X-ray computed tomography (MCST) was performed on a seventeenth-century panel painting from the collection of the National Academy of San Luca Gallery in Rome. The use of MSCT allowed us to detect the numerous characteristics of the wood used, the panel construction, and its condition, leading to a complete preliminary interpretation of its structural characteristics.