Foundation models in computer vision have demonstrated exceptional performance in zero-shot and few-shot tasks by extracting multi-purpose features from large-scale datasets through self-supervised pre-training methods. However, these models often overlook the severe corruption in cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) images by high-level noises. We introduce DRACO, a Denoising-Reconstruction Autoencoder for CryO-EM, inspired by the Noise2Noise (N2N) approach. By processing cryo-EM movies into odd and even images and treating them as independent noisy observations, we apply a denoising-reconstruction hybrid training scheme. We mask both images to create denoising and reconstruction tasks. For DRACO's pre-training, the quality of the dataset is essential, we hence build a high-quality, diverse dataset from an uncurated public database, including over 270,000 movies or micrographs. After pre-training, DRACO naturally serves as a generalizable cryo-EM image denoiser and a foundation model for various cryo-EM downstream tasks. DRACO demonstrates the best performance in denoising, micrograph curation, and particle picking tasks compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
@article{arxiv.2410.11373,
title = {DRACO: A Denoising-Reconstruction Autoencoder for Cryo-EM},
author = {Yingjun Shen and Haizhao Dai and Qihe Chen and Yan Zeng and Jiakai Zhang and Yuan Pei and Jingyi Yu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.11373},
year = {2024}
}