Local regularization of tilt projections reduces artifacts in electron tomography

Abstract

Electron tomography produces very high resolution 3D image volumes useful for investigating the structure and function of cellular components. Unfortunately, unavoidable discontinuities and physical constraints in the acquisition geometry lead to a range of artifacts that can affect the reconstructed image. In particular, highly electron dense regions, such as gold nanoparticles, can hide proximal biological structures and degrade the overall quality of the reconstructed tomograms. In this work we introduce a pre-reconstruction non-conservative non-linear isotropic diffusion (NID) filter that automatically identifies and reduces local irregularities in the tilt projections. We illustrate the..