Correlating electrochemical stimulus to structural change in liquid electron microscopy videos using the structural dissimilarity metric

Justin T Mulvey; Katen P Iyer; Tomàs Ortega; Jovany G Merham; Yevheniy Pivak; Hongyu Sun; Allon I Hochbaum; Joseph P Patterson

doi:10.1016/j.ultramic.2023.113894

Correlating electrochemical stimulus to structural change in liquid electron microscopy videos using the structural dissimilarity metric

Ultramicroscopy. 2024 Mar:257:113894. doi: 10.1016/j.ultramic.2023.113894. Epub 2023 Nov 24.

Authors

Justin T Mulvey¹, Katen P Iyer², Tomàs Ortega³, Jovany G Merham⁴, Yevheniy Pivak⁵, Hongyu Sun⁵, Allon I Hochbaum⁶, Joseph P Patterson⁷

Affiliations

¹ Department of Material Science and Engineering, University of California-Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. Electronic address: mulveyj@uci.edu.
² Department of Material Science and Engineering, University of California-Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.
³ Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California-Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.
⁴ Department of Chemistry, University of California, California-Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.
⁵ DENSsolutions B.V., Informaticalaan 12, 2628 ZD Delft, the Netherlands.
⁶ Department of Material Science and Engineering, University of California-Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA; Department of Chemistry, University of California, California-Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA; Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, California-Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA; Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, University of California, California-Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.
⁷ Department of Material Science and Engineering, University of California-Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA; Department of Chemistry, University of California, California-Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. Electronic address: patters3@uci.edu.

PMID: 38056395
DOI: 10.1016/j.ultramic.2023.113894

Abstract

In-situ liquid cell transmission electron microscopy (LCTEM) with electrical biasing capabilities has emerged as an invaluable tool for directly imaging electrode processes with high temporal and spatial resolution. However, accurately quantifying structural changes that occur on the electrode and subsequently correlating them to the applied stimulus remains challenging. Here, we present structural dissimilarity (DSSIM) analysis as segmentation-free video processing algorithm for locally detecting and quantifying structural change occurring in LCTEM videos. In this study, DSSIM analysis is applied to two in-situ LCTEM videos to demonstrate how to implement this algorithm and interpret the results. We show DSSIM analysis can be used as a visualization tool for qualitative data analysis by highlighting structural changes which are easily missed when viewing the raw data. Furthermore, we demonstrate how DSSIM analysis can serve as a quantitative metric and efficiently convert 3-dimensional microscopy videos to 1-dimenional plots which makes it easy to interpret and compare events occurring at different timepoints in a video. In the analyses presented here, DSSIM is used to directly correlate the magnitude and temporal scale of structural change to the features of the applied electrical bias. ImageJ, Python, and MATLAB programs, including a user-friendly interface and accompanying documentation, are published alongside this manuscript to make DSSIM analysis easily accessible to the scientific community.

Keywords: Electrochemistry; ImageJ; Liquid cell transmission electron microscopy; Quantitative image analysis; Structural dissimilarity; Structural similarity.