cryoSENSE: Compressive Sensing Enables High-throughput Microscopy with Sparse and Generative Priors on the Protein Cryo-EM Image Manifold
Zain Shabeeb, Daniel Saeedi, Darin Tsui, Vida Jamali, Amirali Aghazadeh
Abstract
Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) enables the atomic-resolution visualization of biomolecules; however, modern direct detectors generate data volumes that far exceed the available storage and transfer bandwidth, thereby constraining practical throughput. We introduce cryoSENSE, the computational realization of a hardware-software co-designed framework for compressive cryo-EM sensing and acquisition. We show that cryo-EM images of proteins lie on low-dimensional manifolds that can be independently represented using sparse priors in predefined bases and generative priors captured by a denoising diffusion model. cryoSENSE leverages these low-dimensional manifolds to enable faithful image reconstruction from spatial and Fourier-domain undersampled measurements while preserving downstream structural resolution. In experiments, cryoSENSE increases acquisition throughput by up to 2.5xwhile retaining the original 3D resolution, offering controllable trade-offs between the number of masked measurements and the level of downsampling. Sparse priors favor faithful reconstruction from Fourier-domain measurements and moderate compression, whereas generative diffusion priors achieve accurate recovery from pixel-domain measurements and more severe undersampling.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{cvpr2026_cryosensecompres,
title = {cryoSENSE: Compressive Sensing Enables High-throughput Microscopy with Sparse and Generative Priors on the Protein Cryo-EM Image Manifold},
author = {Zain Shabeeb and Daniel Saeedi and Darin Tsui and Vida Jamali and Amirali Aghazadeh},
booktitle = {CVPR 2026},
year = {2026}
}