Towards real-time analysis of liquid jet alignment in serial femtosecond crystallography
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Date
2022-06-02
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
International Union of Crystallography
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. © 2022 The Authors, CC BY 4.0 licence
Description
Keywords
Crystallography, Automation, Images, Beams, Pulses, Algorithms, Optical microscopy
Citation
Patel, J., Round, A., Bielecki, J., Doerner, K., Kirkwood, H., Letrun, R., Schulz, J., Sikorski, M., Vakili, M., de Wijn, R., Peele, A., Mancuso, A. P., & Abbey, B. (2022). Towards real-time analysis of liquid jet alignment in serial femtosecond crystallography. Journal of Applied Crystallography, 55(4), 944-952. doi:10.1107/S1600576722005891