China Develops the World's First Intelligent Transmission Electron Microscope System, Aeye
China Develops the World's First Intelligent Transmission Electron Microscope System, Aeye
The transmission electron microscope (TEM) is a core research instrument in fields such as advanced materials, energy and chemical engineering, and the life sciences, yet for nearly a century it has relied on manual operation, suffering from bottlenecks such as low efficiency, strong subjectivity, and difficulty with quantitative statistics. Recently, a Chinese research team rewrote this situation.
According to People's Daily, a team led by Deng Dehui and Liu Wei at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with the Shenyang Institute of Automation, successfully developed the world's first intelligent TEM system—Aeye. On May 24 it passed a scientific and technological achievement appraisal in Beijing and was judged to be a world first at a leading international level.
Aeye overcame five key technologies: embodied-intelligence high-vacuum sample transfer, autonomous adjustment of electron-optical imaging, intelligent nanoscale sample positioning, autonomous image acquisition and real-time analysis, and system-wide state sensing and scheduling coordination. It achieves unmanned, intelligent operation across the entire "sample transfer—imaging—analysis" workflow, like a "wisdom eye" that peers into the atomic world.
Taking the analysis of zeolite catalysts as an example, Aeye analyzes 168 samples and captures more than 4,000 images per day on average, and can autonomously generate professional reports containing quantitative statistics such as particle size, dispersion, and crystal configuration. Its image-analysis efficiency is more than 300 times that of manual work, and the volume of data it produces in two weeks equals a year's workload for a conventional electron microscope.
This achievement marks the first leap of the TEM from "manual operation" to "fully autonomous AI-driven operation," provides an important demonstration for the intelligentization of high-end research instruments, and takes human efficiency in exploring the ultra-microscopic world to a new level.
(Compiled from a report by Guangming Daily; the original article, "Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics Develops the World's First Intelligent Transmission Electron Microscope System, Aeye," was published on the People's Daily app. Copyright belongs to the original author.)