  The initial evidence of astrophysical neutrinos by the IceCube Neutrino
Observatory stemmed from the high-energy starting events (HESE) sample: a
selection of the highest-energy neutrino interactions that occurred within the
detector fiducial volume. Each event was reconstructed based on our best
knowledge of the ice at the time, with the latest results published in a
description of the sample using 7.5 years of data. Since then, several major
improvements in ice modeling have occurred using in-situ calibration data.
These include a microscopic description of ice anisotropy arising from ice
crystal birefringence and a more complete mapping of the ice layer undulations
across the detector. The improvements feed into more accurate descriptions of
individual events, and can especially affect the directional reconstruction of
particle showers. Here, we apply the latest ice model in an exact manner to
reconstruct IceCube's high-energy events using DirectFit. This reconstruction
samples posterior distributions across parameters of interest by performing
full event resimulation and photon propagation at each step. We obtain improved
per-event descriptions, as well as updates on previously published source
searches using the aggregated sample.
