Sparsity-based Ankylography for Recovering 3D molecular structures from single-shot 2D scattered light intensity

If the following paper is telling you anything, it is to never listen to anyone who thinks something is impossible because they cannot discuss rationally their model priors. For context here are two blog entries of a few years back on the subject of Ankylography reconstruction.

• Everyone knows this is impossible: Is Ankylography an instance of Compressive Sensing ?
• The Trial That Wasn't

 And now, let us read the fantastic job of Maor Mutzafi, Yoav Shechtman, Yonina Eldar, Oren Cohen & Mordechai Segev !

 

Sparsity-based Ankylography for Recovering 3D molecular structures from single-shot 2D scattered light intensity by Maor Mutzafi, Yoav Shechtman, Yonina C. Eldar, Oren Cohen & Mordechai Segev

  Deciphering the three-dimensional (3D) structure of complex molecules is of major importance, typically accomplished with X-ray crystallography. Unfortunately, many important molecules cannot be crystallized, hence their 3D structure is unknown. Ankylography presents an alternative, relying on scattering an ultrashort X-ray pulse off a single molecule before it disintegrates, measuring the far-field intensity on a two-dimensional surface, followed by computation. However, significant information is absent due to lower dimensionality of the measurements and the inability to measure the phase. Recent Ankylography experiments attracted much interest, but it was counter-argued that Ankylography is valid only for objects containing a small number of volume pixels. Here, we propose a sparsity-based approach to reconstruct the 3D structure of molecules. Sparsity is natural for Ankylography, because molecules can be represented compactly in stoichiometric basis. Utilizing sparsity, we surpass current limits on recoverable information by orders of magnitude, paving the way for deciphering the 3D structure of macromolecules.

 
 

Join the CompressiveSensing subreddit or the Google+ Community or the Facebook page and post there !
Liked this entry ? subscribe to Nuit Blanche's feed, there's more where that came from. You can also subscribe to Nuit Blanche by Email, explore the Big Picture in Compressive Sensing or the Matrix Factorization Jungle and join the conversations on compressive sensing, advanced matrix factorization and calibration issues on Linkedin.