Transfer function restoration in 3D electron microscopy via iterative data refinement

Three-dimensional electron microscopy (3D-EM) is a powerful tool for visualizing complex biological systems. As with any other imaging device, the electron microscope introduces a transfer function (called in this field the contrast transfer function, CTF) into the image acquisition process that modulates the various frequencies of the signal. Thus, the 3D reconstructions performed with these CTF-affected projections are also affected by an implicit 3D transfer function. For high-resolution electron microscopy, the effect of the CTF is quite dramatic and limits severely the achievable resolution. In this work we make use of the iterative data refinement (IDR) technique to ameliorate the effect of the CTF. It is demonstrated that the approach can be successfully applied to noisy data.