Towards real-time analysis of liquid jet alignment in serial femtosecond crystallography
Open Access
- 1 August 2022
- journal article
- research article
- Published by International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) in Journal of Applied Crystallography
- Vol. 55 (4), 944-952
- https://doi.org/10.1107/s1600576722005891
Abstract
Liquid sample delivery systems are used extensively for serial femtosecond crystallography at X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs). However, misalignment of the liquid jet and the XFEL beam leads to the X-rays either partially or completely missing the sample, resulting in sample wastage and a loss of experiment time. Implemented here is an algorithm to analyse optical images using machine vision to determine whether there is overlap of the X-ray beam and liquid jet. The long-term goal is to use the output from this algorithm to implement an automated feedback mechanism to maintain constant alignment of the X-ray beam and liquid jet. The key elements of this jet alignment algorithm are discussed and its performance is characterized by comparing the results with a manual analysis of the optical image data. The success rate of the algorithm for correctly identifying hits is quantified via a similarity metric, the Dice coefficient. In total four different nozzle designs were used in this study, yielding an overall Dice coefficient of 0.98.Keywords
This publication has 28 references indexed in Scilit:
- Double-flow focused liquid injector for efficient serial femtosecond crystallographyScientific Reports, 2017
- Liquid explosions induced by X-ray laser pulsesNature Physics, 2016
- Protein crystal screening and characterization for serial femtosecond nanocrystallographyScientific Reports, 2016
- Region-of-Interest Extraction Based on Saliency Analysis of Co-Occurrence Histogram in High Spatial Resolution Remote Sensing ImagesIEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, 2015
- Electron Diffraction from Liquids Jets in TEMMicroscopy and Microanalysis, 2009
- Gas dynamic virtual nozzle for generation of microscopic droplet streamsJournal of Physics D: Applied Physics, 2008
- Physics of liquid jetsReports on Progress in Physics, 2008
- Machine vision and background remover-based approach for PCB solder joints inspectionInternational Journal of Production Research, 2007
- Region-of-interest tomography using exponential radial samplingIEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 1995
- A Threshold Selection Method from Gray-Level HistogramsIEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 1979