CryoWaveGS: Wave-Optical Gaussian Splatting for Cryo-Electron Tomography

Gaussian Splatting has recently been adapted to tomographic reconstruction, but existing formulations assume a ray model that discards the depth at which scattering occurs. This approximation fails past a computable switch point that the resolution of current cryo-ET reconstructions does not reach, and that atomic-resolution series do. We introduce CryoWaveGS, a Gaussian Splatting reconstruction with a wave-optical forward model. Because Fresnel propagation maps a Gaussian to a Gaussian with complex covariance, depth-resolved diffraction can be rendered in a single rasterization pass at a cost similar to that of the ray-based renderer, and within $1.3\times$ end to end on our densest run. We validate the renderer against independent multislice simulation and map where the ray approximation is adequate and where it is not. We evaluate on measured cryo-ET and atomic-resolution tilt series against conventional, implicit-field and matched ray-based baselines under a single scoring pipeline.