Bio


Axel is a PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He is jointly supervised by Pr. Mike Dunne (LCLS, SLAC) and Pr. Gordon Wetzstein. His research focuses on solving inverse problems that arise in scientific imaging, that is to say getting as much information as possible about hidden physical quantities from noisy or sparsely sampled measurements.

Honors & Awards


  • French Academy of Science Prize, Ecole Polytechnique (2021)

Education & Certifications


  • MS, Ecole Polytechnique, France, Theoretical Physics (2020)

Lab Affiliations


All Publications


  • Deep Generative Modeling for Volume Reconstruction in Cryo-Electron Microscopy. Journal of structural biology Donnat, C., Levy, A., Poitevin, F., Zhong, E. D., Miolane, N. 2022: 107920

    Abstract

    Advances in cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) for high-resolution imaging of biomolecules in solution have provided new challenges and opportunities for algorithm development for 3D reconstruction. Next-generation volume reconstruction algorithms that combine generative modelling with end-to-end unsupervised deep learning techniques have shown promise, but many technical and theoretical hurdles remain, especially when applied to experimental cryo-EM images. In light of the proliferation of such methods, we propose here a critical review of recent advances in the field of deep generative modelling for cryo-EM reconstruction. The present review aims to (i) provide a unified statistical framework using terminology familiar to machine learning researchers with no specific background in cryo-EM, (ii) review the current methods in this framework, and (iii) outline outstanding bottlenecks and avenues for improvements in the field.

    View details for DOI 10.1016/j.jsb.2022.107920

    View details for PubMedID 36356882

  • CryoAI: Amortized Inference of Poses for Ab Initio Reconstruction of 3D Molecular Volumes from Real Cryo-EM Images. Computer vision - ECCV ... : ... European Conference on Computer Vision : proceedings. European Conference on Computer Vision Levy, A., Poitevin, F., Martel, J., Nashed, Y., Peck, A., Miolane, N., Ratner, D., Dunne, M., Wetzstein, G. 2022; 13681: 540-557

    Abstract

    Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has become a tool of fundamental importance in structural biology, helping us understand the basic building blocks of life. The algorithmic challenge of cryo-EM is to jointly estimate the unknown 3D poses and the 3D electron scattering potential of a biomolecule from millions of extremely noisy 2D images. Existing reconstruction algorithms, however, cannot easily keep pace with the rapidly growing size of cryo-EM datasets due to their high computational and memory cost. We introduce cryoAI, an ab initio reconstruction algorithm for homogeneous conformations that uses direct gradient-based optimization of particle poses and the electron scattering potential from single-particle cryo-EM data. CryoAI combines a learned encoder that predicts the poses of each particle image with a physics-based decoder to aggregate each particle image into an implicit representation of the scattering potential volume. This volume is stored in the Fourier domain for computational efficiency and leverages a modern coordinate network architecture for memory efficiency. Combined with a symmetrized loss function, this framework achieves results of a quality on par with state-of-the-art cryo-EM solvers for both simulated and experimental data, one order of magnitude faster for large datasets and with significantly lower memory requirements than existing methods.

    View details for DOI 10.1007/978-3-031-19803-8_32

    View details for PubMedID 36745134