Fill in the Blanks: Using Math to Turn Lo-Res Datasets Into Hi-Res Samples

In the early spring of 2009, a team of doctors at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University lifted a 2-year-old into an MRI scanner. The boy, whom I’ll call Bryce, looked tiny and forlorn inside the cavernous metal device. The stuffed monkey dangling from the entrance to the scanner did little to cheer […]
Illustration Gabriel Peyre
Using a mathematical concept called sparsity, the compressed-sensing algorithm takes lo-res files and transforms them into sharp images.
Illustration: Gabriel Peyre