End-to-end orientation estimation from 2D cryo-EM images

Abstract

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is a Nobel Prize-winning technique for determining high-resolution 3D structures of biological macromolecules. A 3D structure is reconstructed from hundreds of thousands of noisy 2D projection images. However, existing 3D reconstruction methods are still time-consuming, and one of the major computational bottlenecks is recovering the unknown orientation of the particle in each 2D image. The dominant methods typically exploit an expensive global search on each image to estimate the missing orientations. Here, a novel end-to-end supervised learning method is introduced to directly recover the missing orientations from 2D cryo-EM images. A neural network is used to approximate the mapping from images to orientations. A robust loss function is proposed for optimizing the parameters of the network, which can handle both asymmetric and symmetric 3D structures. Experiments on synthetic data sets with various symmetry types confirm that the neural network is capable of recovering orientations from 2D cryo-EM images, and the results on a real cryo-EM data set further demonstrate its potential under more challenging imaging conditions.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Jan 21, 2022
Source ID
10.1107/s2059798321011761

Entities

People

  • Bingyao Huang
  • Haibin Ling
  • Liguo Wang
  • Qun Liu
  • Ruyi Lian
  • Yuewei Lin

Organizations

  • Brookhaven National Laboratory
  • National Science Foundation
  • Office of Science
  • Stony Brook University

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Nanoscale Plasmonic Nanotechnology
  • Neural Network Machine Learning.
  • Quantum Chemistry

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Machine Learning Algorithms
  • AI & ML - Neural Networks
  • Microelectronics