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Squeak, squeak.
In the laboratory, the lab mouse whose fate Ryan held by the scruff of its neck was still struggling, and only once he'd finished his phone call did he set it into the observation box.
"Boss, the equipment's all been calibrated," Julian Prosser said, coming over at that point.
"No problems on our end either," said two research assistants standing around them.
Ryan said, "Then let's begin."
In front of the lab mouse was a complete photoacoustic scanner setup.
It consisted mainly of a laser scanner, a photoacoustic signal sensor, and a monitor on the outside.
The laser scanner was a black square box, currently fixed above the mouse's observation box by a mechanical arm, aimed directly at the mouse.
The photoacoustic detector, shaped like a horn, was fixed above the emitter. It could detect and sense photoacoustic signals.
Because a photoacoustic signal was a special kind of ultrasonic wave, it was in essence an ultrasonic sensor as well, capable of converting the ultrasound it sensed into electrical signals.
Calling it a photoacoustic signal sensor was perfectly fine too.
This set of equipment had arrived fresh only yesterday, and this lab mouse was the first mouse to experience it.
Prosser and the other assistants seized the mouse inside the observation box and strapped it to a small wooden board within, to make the coming laser scan more convenient.
Ryan glanced at the project progress displayed on the system. It had already advanced to sixteen percent.
At this level of progress, the research on the laser detection apparatus and the photoacoustic signal reception apparatus had, surprisingly, already been completed.
What was currently in progress was research on the photoacoustic signal parsing algorithm.
This was a point that astonished him a great deal.
He'd gotten it wrong before. The most important part of this scanner wasn't the scanner's hardware at all, but the algorithm that parsed the signals.
After receiving the photoacoustic signals, how those signals had to be processed in order to parse out various kinds of information, that was a great field of study in itself.
For instance, some segment of a photoacoustic signal might represent a person's blood type information. As long as you used an algorithm to parse out that segment of signal, you could learn whether that person's blood type was A or B.
But this kind of parsing required a specific algorithm. Without that algorithm, the photoacoustic signals received were meaningless garbled code.
Of course, the parsing algorithm being important didn't mean the equipment wasn't important.
The equipment, which occupied sixteen percent of the project's progress, demanded manufacturing processes and performance specifications that already exceeded current production capability.
For instance, to completely detect an extremely faint, specific photoacoustic signal from fifteen meters away, in an everyday setting with a great deal of noise present, you had to manufacture a photoacoustic signal sensor of extremely high sensitivity.
And inside the sensor, the most important component was the piezoelectric wafer, which determined the sensor's level of sensitivity.
The manufacturing process required for the piezoelectric wafer given in the system was flatly not from the same era as the present one.
To produce this kind of wafer, you had to solve a whole series of problems starting from the source, raw materials, processes, production machinery, and so on.
And this was only one of its components. The other components were every bit as troublesome as the piezoelectric wafer.
To make the sensor the system required, either he developed it himself or had someone develop an entire new photoacoustic sensor production line specifically to manufacture it, or he went to Aegis Industrial to find a way.
Between the two lines of thinking, going to Aegis Industrial for help was clearly the better choice.
So once he'd seen that the equipment portion was complete, he'd sent the blueprints directly to Patricia and had her find a way.
Otherwise, he'd still be worrying over the equipment right now.
The current set of equipment was what Aegis Industrial had managed to manufacture after exhausting every method. On the whole, it hadn't yet reached the system's requirements in terms of size, but in overall performance it was already not far off.
Back in the laboratory.
Before long, the lab mouse in the observation box had been trussed up thoroughly, able only to lie in the box squeaking loudly.
Ryan and Prosser's group of three sealed its mouth shut, then withdrew from the experimental area and came out beside the monitor.
Here they could control the equipment's on and off switches with a computer, and could also see the images of the photoacoustic signals the sensor detected on a digital oscilloscope.
Prosser worked the computer and soon started up the equipment inside.
The mechanical arm carrying the laser scanner and the photoacoustic sensor automatically aligned itself with the mouse.
"Let's begin," Ryan said.
"Okay." Prosser pressed the start key.
Ryan and the other two research assistants both looked toward the experiment room.
The operating indicator light on the laser scanner atop the mechanical arm suddenly flashed rapidly several times.
Afterward, it seemed as though no change had occurred at all.
The lab mouse strapped to the board was still struggling with all its might.
But Ryan knew that just now, the laser scanner had already emitted ten pulses of laser light to scan the mouse before them.
These laser pulses had a wavelength of 1550 nanometers, a wavelength easily absorbed by water, so it generally wouldn't cause damage to human bodies or living organisms.
"How did the results turn out?" one assistant asked.
As for the photoacoustic scanner inside the experimental area, they didn't know its specific performance either. Ryan had submitted the blueprints for this equipment directly, and they hadn't participated at all.
But going by ordinary experience, the intensity of ultrasonic signals returning from inside an organism was already very weak, and an amplifier had to be added to guarantee the signal's reception.
And this sort of ultrasound emitted from inside an organism was bound to be many times weaker still than the signals mentioned above.
Their instincts told them the experiment wouldn't go very smoothly.
But in the very next second...
"Signal detected!" Prosser suddenly leaned excitedly in front of the oscilloscope.
There on the oscilloscope, many segments of waveforms unlike the usual ones had suddenly appeared.
These waveforms rose and fell enormously, running together into peak after peak and trough after trough.
Prosser and the other two assistants looked at these dense, undulating signals, astonishment and delight written on their faces.
They truly hadn't expected the signal reception to go this smoothly.
"This should be the photoacoustic signal."
All Ryan could do now was stare blankly at these signals and this data.
Parsing an image and information about the mouse's interior out of this data couldn't be done without a specific algorithm.
This wasn't something the algorithm in the system could accomplish. The algorithm in the system was an algorithm for humans. To deduce the mouse's internal physical condition from photoacoustic signals, he'd have to build a separate mouse algorithm.
Not that Ryan had any intention of using this device to examine mice.
The purpose of today's experiment was to test the equipment, and by the looks of it now, this experiment had clearly been a great success.
"Save all the signal data. Next we'll do a rough analysis of this data first. The signals the sensor received aren't necessarily entirely correct," Ryan said to Prosser.
He wasn't blindly optimistic.
This set of equipment was a substitute provided by Aegis Industrial, not manufactured entirely according to the design in the system. Although its performance was close after assembly, that didn't mean errors wouldn't occur.
"One moment." Prosser backed up the information and handed it to Ryan, astonishment still on his face.
He hadn't expected that Ryan's scanner concept, which had sounded so inconceivable earlier, would take its first step forward this quickly.
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