Volume electron microscopy (vEM) is a demanding yet powerful tool for revealing both ultrastructural and subcellular information in biological systems. Several key strides have been made in recent years in increasing the accessibility and performance of this technique [ 1], yet it is often curtailed by two main factors; the speed of operation, and the destructive nature of the electron beam. The time an experiment takes enforces limits on the size of volumes which can be analysed, which in turn limits the effective ability to capture ultrastructural events, even without the consideration of microscope stability over extended periods of time and the associated upkeep. Moreover, the repeated exposure of the sample to the electron beam during the slice-and-view procedure may drastically alter the sample, rendering analysis difficult or impossible. This is especially true for soft materials, and doubly so when operating at cryogenic conditions. An ideal solution would simultaneously reduce the time of acquisition, whilst also reducing the required exposure to the sample.
A combination of subsampling and inpainting has been demonstrated both in simulation [ 2] and experiment [ 3] to adequately reduce the number of data points required to acquire an equivalent image quality to similar fully sampled references. These techniques allow significantly reduced data acquisition periods and simultaneously reduces the electron flux required to form these data volumes. For cryo FIB-SEM tomography, initial published results demonstrate a reduction in the number of data points to 15% of the original data volume, indicating a potential 6.66 times increase in imaging speed and reduction of electron dose with no loss in data quality.