An image processing approach to the simulation of electron microscopy volumes of atomic structures

The goal of this paper is to construct accurate three-dimensional models from atomic structures that can be compared to Electron Microscopy volumes. They, in their turn, can be used to solve fitting and docking problems as well as to generate ground-truth models for the development of image processing algorithms. We use Electron Atomic Scattering Factor (EASF) along with a careful filter design to greatly accelerate the current use of these functions and strongly reduce computer memory requirements. We show that our method is 3 orders of magnitude faster than existing implementations of EASFs in Fourier space as well as more accurate than their standard implementations. The algorithm is freely available in the software package Xmipp (http://xmipp.cnb.csic.es) [1].