Biological application of compressed sensing tomography in the scanning electron microscope

The three-dimensional tomographic reconstruction of a biological sample, namely collagen fibrils in human dermal tissue, was obtained from a set of projection-images acquired in the Scanning Electron Microscope. A tailored strategy for the transmission imaging mode was implemented in the microscope and proved effective in acquiring the projections needed for the tomographic reconstruction. Suitable projection alignment and Compressed Sensing formulation were used to overcome the limitations arising from the experimental acquisition strategy and to improve the reconstruction of the sample. The undetermined problem of structure reconstruction from a set of projections, limited in number and angular range, was indeed supported by exploiting the sparsity of the object projected in the electron microscopy images. In particular, the proposed system was able to preserve the reconstruction accuracy even in presence of a significant reduction of experimental projections.