R. Marabini et al., 3D RECONSTRUCTION IN ELECTRON-MICROSCOPY USING ART WITH SMOOTH SPHERICALLY SYMMETRICAL VOLUME ELEMENTS (BLOBS), Ultramicroscopy, 72(1-2), 1998, pp. 53-65
Algebraic reconstruction techniques (ART) are iterative procedures for
solving systems of linear equations. They have been used in tomograph
y to recover objects from their projections. In this work we apply an
ART approach in which the basis functions used to describe the objects
are not based on voxels, but are much smoother functions named ''blob
s'', The data collection studied in this work follows the so-called ''
conical tilt geometry'' that is commonly used in many applications of
three-dimensional electron microscopy of biological macromolecules. Th
e performance of ART with blobs is carefully compared with a currently
well-known three dimensional (3D) reconstruction algorithm (weighted
backprojection) using a methodology which assigns a level of statistic
al significance to a claim of relative superiority of one algorithm ov
er another for a particular task. The conclusion we reach is that ART
with blobs produces high-quality reconstructions and is, in particular
, superior to weighted backprojection in recovering features along the
''vertical'' direction. For the exact implementation recommended in t
his paper, the computational costs of ART are almost an order of magni
tude smaller than those of WBP. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rig
hts reserved.