The benefit of thresholding carbon layers in electron tomographic tilt series by intensity downshifting

When performing electron tomography, tilt series of images are often acquired from samples that contain unwanted carbonaceous material, such as an embedding resin, a thin carbon support film or hydrocarbon contamination. The presence of such layers can introduce artefacts in reconstructions, obscuring features of interest. Here, we illustrate the benefit of preprocessing a high-angle annular dark-field tomographic tilt series by thresholding unwanted low-density materials using a simple intensity downshifting procedure. The resulting tomograms have fewer artefacts and segmentation can be performed more accurately. We present two representative examples taken from studies of catalyst nanoparticles and amyloid plaque core material from the human brain.