Specimen Thickness and Tilt Offset Determination for Cryo-Electron Tomography from a Hypothesis Testing and Optimization Perspective

In cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) data processing, determining the thickness and tilt offset of the specimen is essential for decreasing the computation burden during subsequent processing. Current methods include micrograph-based methods and tomogram-based methods, while all the existing methods are unstable in certain aspects. In this paper, we propose a novel tomogram-based specimen thickness and tilt offset determination method. The specimen region is segmented based on hypothesis testing, and the boundaries of the specimen are determined based on optimization. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves reliable estimation outcomes on different kinds of specimens and outperforms the existing micrograph-based methods.