Untrained Network as Prior: Recovering 3D Chemistry from Just 16 Electron-Microscope Views

bravo_abad · x · 2026-09-19

In electron tomography, reconstructing a 3D chemical map normally requires many viewing angles, but samples can't tilt far enough and more measurements mean more radiation damage — leaving an inverse problem with big data gaps. Del Pozo Bueno et al. skip pretraining entirely: an untrained 3D convolutional network is optimized directly against the measured projections, with the architecture itself acting as a prior favoring structured 3D solutions over noise. A clever twist jointly reconstructs all chemical elements to exploit cross-element constraints — a 'deep image prior' approach applied to electron-microscopy chemistry.

Original post →

More from Research

Research channel →