GEM: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and Accurate Cryo-EM Reconstruction

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Qu, Huaizhi, Wang, Xiao, Zhang, Gengwei, Peng, Jie, Chen, Tianlong
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866912622207565824
author Qu, Huaizhi
Wang, Xiao
Zhang, Gengwei
Peng, Jie
Chen, Tianlong
author_facet Qu, Huaizhi
Wang, Xiao
Zhang, Gengwei
Peng, Jie
Chen, Tianlong
contents Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has become a central tool for high-resolution structural biology, yet the massive scale of datasets (often exceeding 100k particle images) renders 3D reconstruction both computationally expensive and memory intensive. Traditional Fourier-space methods are efficient but lose fidelity due to repeated transforms, while recent real-space approaches based on neural radiance fields (NeRFs) improve accuracy but incur cubic memory and computation overhead. Therefore, we introduce GEM, a novel cryo-EM reconstruction framework built on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) that operates directly in real-space while maintaining high efficiency. Instead of modeling the entire density volume, GEM represents proteins with compact 3D Gaussians, each parameterized by only 11 values. To further improve the training efficiency, we designed a novel gradient computation to 3D Gaussians that contribute to each voxel. This design substantially reduced both memory footprint and training cost. On standard cryo-EM benchmarks, GEM achieves up to 48% faster training and 12% lower memory usage compared to state-of-the-art methods, while improving local resolution by as much as 38.8%. These results establish GEM as a practical and scalable paradigm for cryo-EM reconstruction, unifying speed, efficiency, and high-resolution accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/UNITES-Lab/GEM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_25075
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GEM: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and Accurate Cryo-EM Reconstruction
Qu, Huaizhi
Wang, Xiao
Zhang, Gengwei
Peng, Jie
Chen, Tianlong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has become a central tool for high-resolution structural biology, yet the massive scale of datasets (often exceeding 100k particle images) renders 3D reconstruction both computationally expensive and memory intensive. Traditional Fourier-space methods are efficient but lose fidelity due to repeated transforms, while recent real-space approaches based on neural radiance fields (NeRFs) improve accuracy but incur cubic memory and computation overhead. Therefore, we introduce GEM, a novel cryo-EM reconstruction framework built on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) that operates directly in real-space while maintaining high efficiency. Instead of modeling the entire density volume, GEM represents proteins with compact 3D Gaussians, each parameterized by only 11 values. To further improve the training efficiency, we designed a novel gradient computation to 3D Gaussians that contribute to each voxel. This design substantially reduced both memory footprint and training cost. On standard cryo-EM benchmarks, GEM achieves up to 48% faster training and 12% lower memory usage compared to state-of-the-art methods, while improving local resolution by as much as 38.8%. These results establish GEM as a practical and scalable paradigm for cryo-EM reconstruction, unifying speed, efficiency, and high-resolution accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/UNITES-Lab/GEM.
title GEM: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and Accurate Cryo-EM Reconstruction
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25075