Neural network method for enhancing electron microscope images

Since the early 1930s, electron microscopy has provided unprecedented access to the world of the extraordinarily small, revealing intricate details that are otherwise impossible to discern with conventional light microscopy. But to achieve high resolution over a large sample area, the energy of the electron beams needs to be cranked up, which is costly and detrimental to the sample under observation. Texas A&M University researchers may have found a new method to improve the quality of low-resolution electron micrographs without compromising the integrity of samples. By training deep neural networks on pairs of images from the same sample but at different physical resolutions, they have found that details in lower-resolution images can be enhanced further. "Normally, a high-energy electron beam is passed through the sample at locations where greater image resolution is desired. But with our image processing techniques, we can super-resolve an entire image by using just a few smaller-sized, high-resolution images," said Yu Ding, Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.