GenEM: Physics-Informed Generative Cryo-Electron Microscopy
Jiakai Zhang Qihe Chen Yan Zeng Wenyuan Gao Xuming He Zhijie Liu Jingyi Yu
In the past decade, deep conditional generative models have revolutionized
the generation of realistic images, extending their application from
entertainment to scientific domains. Single-particle cryo-electron microscopy
(cryo-EM) is crucial in resolving near-atomic resolution 3D structures of
proteins, such as the SARS-COV-2 spike protein. To achieve high-resolution
reconstruction, AI models for particle picking and pose estimation have been
adopted. However, their performance is still limited as they lack high-quality
annotated datasets. To address this, we introduce physics-informed generative
cryo-electron microscopy (GenEM), which for the first time integrates
physical-based cryo-EM simulation with a generative unpaired noise translation
to generate physically correct synthetic cryo-EM datasets with realistic
noises. Initially, GenEM simulates the cryo-EM imaging process based on a
virtual specimen. To generate realistic noises, we leverage an unpaired noise
translation via contrastive learning with a novel mask-guided sampling scheme.
Extensive experiments show that GenEM is capable of generating realistic
cryo-EM images. The generated dataset can further enhance particle picking and
pose estimation models, eventually improving the reconstruction resolution. We
will release our code and annotated synthetic datasets.