University of Texas at Austin

Past Event: Oden Institute Seminar

Inverse Problems and Imaging

Joe Kileel, Postdoctoral Fellow, Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Princeton University

1:30 – 3PM
Tuesday Jan 21, 2020

POB 6.304

Abstract

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is an imaging technique to determine the shape of 3-D macromolecules from massive datasets of noisy 2-D projections. Recognized by the 2017 Chemistry Nobel Prize, cryo-EM captures molecules in their native states, in contrast to traditional imaging modalities. The tradeoff is that the resulting inverse problem has rich mathematical and computational challenges, including extreme noise, unknown orientations, big data and conformational heterogeneity. This lecture presents computational mathematics that has arisen from cryo-EM. In particular, I will discuss a general framework for estimation under compact group actions, that connects information theory and group invariant theory. Other perspectives from computational algebra also appear, including robust solvers for certain large-scale polynomial systems and fast methods for tensor rank decomposition. These ideas are brought together in a moment-based approach for ab initio cryo-EM reconstruction, in which the computational complexity is controlled mostly by the desired resolution rather than the size of the dataset.

Event information

Date
1:30 – 3PM
Tuesday Jan 21, 2020
Location POB 6.304
Hosted by Tom Yankeelov