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v1.1



EMAN 1.1 snapshots are now available !


Software for Single Particle Analysis and Electron Micrograph Analysis

by Steve Ludtke, Phil Baldwin
National Center for Macromolecular Imaging


This page has been accessed  unique times since June 12, 1999.
NEW! Single particle reconstruction tutorial/introduction presentatation
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EMAN is a complete software package for reconstructing 3d models from a set of randomly oriented projections. This is primarily aimed at the electron cryomicroscopy / single particle analysis community, but many of the utilities and (for programmers) objects can be applied to other image processing problems.

EMAN is provided free of charge as a service to the scientific community. One of it's biggest advantages is ease of use. An inexperienced image processor should be able to download the EMAN package, and begin a 3d reconstruction almost immediately. An entire 3d model refinement can be run with a single shell command. Understanding the details will obviously take a bit of time, but the user can start producing useful results almost immediately.

EMAN is designed with a 3-tier structure. At the highest level is a set of GUI (graphical user interface) programs which should allow anyone, even an image processing/EM novice, to perform a 3d reconstruction from scratch. The GUI includes utilities for CTF fitting and correction, browsing image files, examining the EMAN command history, etc.

The middle tier consists of a set of command line utilites which perform most of the actual processing in the package. Individual programs will do operations like reproject 3d models, classify particles, align particles, etc.

The lowest tier is a set of C++ objects which handle all of the most common low level image processing operations necessary for cryo-EM work. These objects can read/write images and 3d models in a variety of formats, do FFTs, DWTs, filter, mask, align, etc. Most of the second tier programs are just a few dozen lines of code. The real work is done in the underlying objects which could easily be adapted to other tasks. FFT support is provided by the (excellent) FFTW library written at MIT.



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