Special purpose 3-D reconstruction and restoration algorithms for electron microscopy of nanoscale objects and an enabling software toolkit

Two algorithms are described for electron microscopy tasks: (1) 3-D reconstruction of an infectious bacteriophage, including the tail, based on a set of single-particle cryo electron microscopy images of identical phage particles with one image per particle and (2) restoration, resolution enhancement, and classification of spherical viruses in a cell based on a tomographic reconstruction of the entire cell. While different tasks, the statistical algorithms, which are maximum likelihood estimators, have extensive commonality. In order to provide solutions for such tasks in a timely fashion, a software toolkit has been created, based on the commonality, for writing parallel software systems to solve these problems.