3-D reconstruction of DNA filaments from stereo cryo-electron micrographs

We propose an algorithm for the 3-D reconstruction of DNA filaments from a pair of stereo cryo-electron micrographs. The underlying principle is to specify a 3-D model of a filament – described as a spline curve – and to fit it to the 2-D data using a snake-like algorithm. To drive the snake, we constructed a ridge-enhancing vector field for each of the images based on the maximum output of a bank of rotating matched filters. The magnitude of the field gives a confidence measure for the presence of a filament and the phase indicates its direction. We also propose a fast algorithm to perform the matched filtering. The snake algorithm starts with an initial curve (input by the user) and evolves it so that its projections on the viewing plane are in maximal agreement with the corresponding vector fields.