Quantitative Analysis of Mesoporous Structures by Electron Tomography: A Phantom Study

However, a reliable quantification of such pore structure from ET highly depends on the fidelity of segmented reconstruction, which can be significantly affected, e.g. by the raw data quality, the limited tilting range, artifacts introduced during alignment and further depends the reconstruction algorithm.

Therefore, we systematically investigate the reconstruction reliability of three main-stream algorithms including simultaneous iterative reconstruction technique (SIRT), total variation minimization (TVM) and discrete algebraic reconstruction technique (DART) for mesoporous materials using different imperfect (realistic) tilt-series based on a set of phantom simulations. We found that DART outperforms the other two methods in reliably revealing small pores and narrow channels, especially when the number of projections is strongly constrained.