A practical method to determine the effective resolution in incoherent experimental electron tomography

Hamed Heidari Mezerji; Wouter Van den Broek; Sara Bals

doi:10.1016/j.ultramic.2011.01.021

A practical method to determine the effective resolution in incoherent experimental electron tomography

Ultramicroscopy. 2011 Apr;111(5):330-6. doi: 10.1016/j.ultramic.2011.01.021. Epub 2011 Jan 20.

Authors

Hamed Heidari Mezerji¹, Wouter Van den Broek, Sara Bals

Affiliation

¹ EMAT, University of Antwerp, Groenenborgerlaan 171, B-2020 Antwerp, Belgium. Hamed.Heidari@gmail.com

PMID: 21396527
DOI: 10.1016/j.ultramic.2011.01.021

Abstract

It is not straightforward to determine resolution for a 3D reconstruction when performing an electron tomography experiment. Different contributions such as missing wedge and misalignment add up and often influence the final resolution in an anisotropic manner. The conventional resolution measures can not be used for all of the reconstruction techniques, especially for iterative techniques which are more commonly used for electron tomography in materials science. Here we define a quantitative resolution measure that determines the resolution in three orthogonal directions of the reconstruction. As an application we use this measure to determine the optimum number of simultaneous iterative reconstruction technique (SIRT) iterations to reconstruct the gold nanoparticles, based on a high angle annular dark field STEM (HAADF-STEM) tilt series.