We develop in this paper a novel intrinsic classification algorithm -- multi-frequency class averaging (MFCA) -- for classifying noisy projection images obtained from three-dimensional cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) by the similarity among their viewing directions. This new algorithm leverages multiple irreducible representations of the unitary group to introduce additional redundancy into the representation of the optimal in-plane rotational alignment, extending and outperforming the existing class averaging algorithm that uses only a single representation. The formal algebraic model and representation theoretic patterns of the proposed MFCA algorithm extend the framework of Hadani and Singer to arbitrary irreducible representations of the unitary group. We conceptually establish the consistency and stability of MFCA by inspecting the spectral properties of a generalized local parallel transport operator through the lens of Wigner $D$-matrices. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm with numerical experiments.
Cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) provides images from different copies of the same biomolecule in arbitrary orientations. Here, we present an end-to-end unsupervised approach that learns individual particle orientations from cryo-EM data while reconstructing the average 3D map of the biomolecule, starting from a random initialization. The approach relies on an auto-encoder architecture where the latent space is explicitly interpreted as orientations used by the decoder to form an image according to the linear projection model. We evaluate our method on simulated data and show that it is able to reconstruct 3D particle maps from noisy- and CTF-corrupted 2D projection images of unknown particle orientations.
Robust and accurate nuclei centroid detection is important for the understanding of biological structures in fluorescence microscopy images. Existing automated nuclei localization methods face three main challenges: (1) Most of object detection methods work only on 2D images and are difficult to extend to 3D volumes; (2) Segmentation-based models can be used on 3D volumes but it is computational expensive for large microscopy volumes and they have difficulty distinguishing different instances of objects; (3) Hand annotated ground truth is limited for 3D microscopy volumes. To address these issues, we present a scalable approach for nuclei centroid detection of 3D microscopy volumes. We describe the RCNN-SliceNet to detect 2D nuclei centroids for each slice of the volume from different directions and 3D agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC) is used to estimate the 3D centroids of nuclei in a volume. The model was trained with the synthetic microscopy data generated using Spatially Constrained Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks (SpCycleGAN) and tested on different types of real 3D microscopy data. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can accurately count and detect the nuclei centroids in a 3D microscopy volume.
Fluorescence microscopy is an essential tool for the analysis of 3D subcellular structures in tissue. An important step in the characterization of tissue involves nuclei segmentation. In this paper, a two-stage method for segmentation of nuclei using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is described. In particular, since creating labeled volumes manually for training purposes is not practical due to the size and complexity of the 3D data sets, the paper describes a method for generating synthetic microscopy volumes based on a spatially constrained cycle-consistent adversarial network. The proposed method is tested on multiple real microscopy data sets and outperforms other commonly used segmentation techniques.
Using cryogenic transmission electron microscopy, we revealed three dimensional (3D) structural details of the electrochemically plated lithium (Li) flakes and their solid electrolyte interphase (SEI), including the composite SEI skin-layer and SEI fossil pieces buried inside the Li matrix. As the SEI skin-layer is largely comprised of nanocrystalline LiF and Li2O in amorphous polymeric matrix, when complete Li stripping occurs, the compromised SEI three-dimensional framework buckles, forming nanoscale bends and wrinkles. We showed that the flexibility and resilience of the SEI skin-layer plays a vital role in preserving an intact SEI 3D framework after Li stripping. The intact SEI network enables the nucleation and growth of the newly plated Li inside the previously formed SEI network in the subsequent cycles, preventing additional large amount of SEI formation between newly plated Li metal and the electrolyte. In addition, cells cycled under the accurately controlled uniaxial pressure can further enhance the repeated utilization of the SEI framework and improve the coulombic efficiency (CE) by up to 97%, demonstrating an effective strategy of reducing the formation of additional SEI and inactive dead Li. The identification of such flexible and porous 3D SEI framework clarifies the working mechanism of SEI in lithium metal anode for batteries. The insights provided in this work will inspire researchers to design more functional artificial 3D SEI on other metal anodes to improve rechargeable metal battery with long cycle life.
Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is an emerging experimental method to characterize the structure of large biomolecular assemblies. Single particle cryo-EM records 2D images (so-called micrographs) of projections of the three-dimensional particle, which need to be processed to obtain the three-dimensional reconstruction. A crucial step in the reconstruction process is particle picking which involves detection of particles in noisy 2D micrographs with low signal-to-noise ratios of typically 1:10 or even lower. Typically, each picture contains a large number of particles, and particles have unknown irregular and nonconvex shapes.