No Arabic abstract
Cryo-Electron Tomography (cryo-ET) is a new 3D imaging technique with unprecedented potential for resolving submicron structural detail. Existing volume visualization methods, however, cannot cope with its very low signal-to-noise ratio. In order to design more powerful transfer functions, we propose to leverage soft segmentation as an explicit component of visualization for noisy volumes. Our technical realization is based on semi-supervised learning where we combine the advantages of two segmentation algorithms. A first weak segmentation algorithm provides good results for propagating sparse user provided labels to other voxels in the same volume. This weak segmentation algorithm is used to generate dense pseudo labels. A second powerful deep-learning based segmentation algorithm can learn from these pseudo labels to generalize the segmentation to other unseen volumes, a task that the weak segmentation algorithm fails at completely. The proposed volume visualization uses the deep-learning based segmentation as a component for segmentation-aware transfer function design. Appropriate ramp parameters can be suggested automatically through histogram analysis. Finally, our visualization uses gradient-free ambient occlusion shading to further suppress visual presence of noise, and to give structural detail desired prominence. The cryo-ET data studied throughout our technical experiments is based on the highest-quality tilted series of intact SARS-CoV-2 virions. Our technique shows the high impact in target sciences for visual data analysis of very noisy volumes that cannot be visualized with existing techniques.
Cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) is an emerging technology for the 3D visualization of structural organizations and interactions of subcellular components at near-native state and sub-molecular resolution. Tomograms captured by cryo-ET contain heterogeneous structures representing the complex and dynamic subcellular environment. Since the structures are not purified or fluorescently labeled, the spatial organization and interaction between both the known and unknown structures can be studied in their native environment. The rapid advances of cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) have generated abundant 3D cellular imaging data. However, the systematic localization, identification, segmentation, and structural recovery of the subcellular components require efficient and accurate large-scale image analysis methods. We introduce AITom, an open-source artificial intelligence platform for cryo-ET researchers. AITom provides many public as well as in-house algorithms for performing cryo-ET data analysis through both the traditional template-based or template-free approach and the deep learning approach. AITom also supports remote interactive analysis. Comprehensive tutorials for each analysis module are provided to guide the user through. We welcome researchers and developers to join this collaborative open-source software development project. Availability: https://github.com/xulabs/aitom
Electron Cryo-Tomography (ECT) enables 3D visualization of macromolecule structure inside single cells. Macromolecule classification approaches based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) were developed to separate millions of macromolecules captured from ECT systematically. However, given the fast accumulation of ECT data, it will soon become necessary to use CNN models to efficiently and accurately separate substantially more macromolecules at the prediction stage, which requires additional computational costs. To speed up the prediction, we compress classification models into compact neural networks with little in accuracy for deployment. Specifically, we propose to perform model compression through knowledge distillation. Firstly, a complex teacher network is trained to generate soft labels with better classification feasibility followed by training of customized student networks with simple architectures using the soft label to compress model complexity. Our tests demonstrate that our compressed models significantly reduce the number of parameters and time cost while maintaining similar classification accuracy.
Motivation: Cryo-Electron Tomography (cryo-ET) is a 3D bioimaging tool that visualizes the structural and spatial organization of macromolecules at a near-native state in single cells, which has broad applications in life science. However, the systematic structural recognition and recovery of macromolecules captured by cryo-ET are difficult due to high structural complexity and imaging limits. Deep learning based subtomogram classification have played critical roles for such tasks. As supervised approaches, however, their performance relies on sufficient and laborious annotation on a large training dataset. Results: To alleviate this major labeling burden, we proposed a Hybrid Active Learning (HAL) framework for querying subtomograms for labelling from a large unlabeled subtomogram pool. Firstly, HAL adopts uncertainty sampling to select the subtomograms that have the most uncertain predictions. Moreover, to mitigate the sampling bias caused by such strategy, a discriminator is introduced to judge if a certain subtomogram is labeled or unlabeled and subsequently the model queries the subtomogram that have higher probabilities to be unlabeled. Additionally, HAL introduces a subset sampling strategy to improve the diversity of the query set, so that the information overlap is decreased between the queried batches and the algorithmic efficiency is improved. Our experiments on subtomogram classification tasks using both simulated and real data demonstrate that we can achieve comparable testing performance (on average only 3% accuracy drop) by using less than 30% of the labeled subtomograms, which shows a very promising result for subtomogram classification task with limited labeling resources.
Cryo-electron tomography (Cryo-ET) is a 3D imaging technique that enables the systemic study of shape, abundance, and distribution of macromolecular structures in single cells in near-atomic resolution. However, the systematic and efficient $textit{de novo}$ recognition and recovery of macromolecular structures captured by Cryo-ET are very challenging due to the structural complexity and imaging limits. Even macromolecules with identical structures have various appearances due to different orientations and imaging limits, such as noise and the missing wedge effect. Explicitly disentangling the semantic features of macromolecules is crucial for performing several downstream analyses on the macromolecules. This paper has addressed the problem by proposing a 3D Spatial Variational Autoencoder that explicitly disentangle the structure, orientation, and shift of macromolecules. Extensive experiments on both synthesized and real cryo-ET datasets and cross-domain evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of our method.
Cryo-electron microscopy (cryoEM) is an increasingly popular method for protein structure determination. However, identifying a sufficient number of particles for analysis (often >100,000) can take months of manual effort. Current computational approaches are limited by high false positive rates and require significant ad-hoc post-processing, especially for unusually shaped particles. To address this shortcoming, we develop Topaz, an efficient and accurate particle picking pipeline using neural networks trained with few labeled particles by newly leveraging the remaining unlabeled particles through the framework of positive-unlabeled (PU) learning. Remarkably, despite using minimal labeled particles, Topaz allows us to improve reconstruction resolution by up to 0.15 {AA} over published particles on three public cryoEM datasets without any post-processing. Furthermore, we show that our novel generalized-expectation criteria approach to PU learning outperforms existing general PU learning approaches when applied to particle detection, especially for challenging datasets of non-globular proteins. We expect Topaz to be an essential component of cryoEM analysis.