In recent years there has been increasing interest in using cryo TEM tomography to study cells in close to their “native” environment.  One limitation of this technique is the relatively low signal to noise ratio in each of the TEM images, since the total electron dose through the sample must be constrained to limit structure damage to the cell.  Even with gold markers added to the sample, robust automatic alignment of the TEM slice data for reconstruction remains difficult. We have tried to address this problem by leveraging recent work in probabilistic analysis, and have constructed a prototype alignment system using Markov random fields (MRF’s)  for alignment, and robust optimization methods for projective model estimation.

For more details check the project webpage.