FlexAlign: An Accurate and Fast Algorithm for Movie Alignment in Cryo-Electron Microscopy

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Authors

STŘELÁK David FILIPOVIČ Jiří JIMÉNEZ-MORENO Amaya CARAZO Jose María SÁNCHEZ SORZANO Carlos Óscar

Year of publication 2020
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source Electronics
MU Faculty or unit

Institute of Computer Science

Citation
Web https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/9/6/1040
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/electronics9061040
Keywords cryo-em; movie alignment; acceleration; gpu; flexalign; cuda; autotuning; cufft; cufftadvisor
Description Cryogenic Electron Microscopy (Cryo-EM) has been established as one of the key players in Structural Biology. It can reconstruct a 3D model of the sample at the near-atomic resolution, which led to a Method of the year award by Nature, and the Nobel Prize in 2017. With the growing number of facilities, faster microscopes, and new imaging techniques, new algorithms are needed to process the so-called movies data produced by the microscopes in real-time, while preserving a high resolution and maximum of additional information. In this article, we present a new algorithm used for movie alignment, called FlexAlign. FlexAlign is able to correctly compensate for the shift produced during the movie acquisition on-the-fly, using the current generation of hardware. The algorithm performs a global and elastic local registration of the movie frames using Cross-Correlation and B-spline interpolation for high precision. We show that our execution time is compatible with real-time correction and that we preserve the high-resolution information up to high frequency.
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