AutoEMXSp

Automated Electron Microscopy X-Ray Spectroscopy for Compositional Characterization of Materials

AutoEMXSp is a fully automated framework for SEM-EDS workflows — from spectral acquisition and quantification, to principled filtering and compositional analysis — all in one click.

🎥 Watch AutoEMXSp in action on a desktop SEM-EDS system at https://youtu.be/Bym58gNxlj0

🧪 Test AutoEMXSp to fit and quantify EDS spectra you have collected on your commercial SEM-EDS system (see Tutorials).

📖 This work is described in:
A. Giunto et al., Accurate SEM‑EDS Quantification, Automation, and Machine Learning Enable High‑Throughput Compositional Characterization of Powders, 2025.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-7837297/v2

✨ Key Features

• Fully automated SEM-EDS phase-level compositional analysis workflow, which includes:

  • Acquisition of EDS spectra, including particle localization if sample is powder. Compatible also with bulk samples, or manual navigation.
  • Quantification of compositions using the peak-to-background method
  • Rule-based filtering of compositions to discard poorly quantified spectra from the analysis
  • Unsupervised machine learning–based analysis to identify the compositions of individual phases in the sample

• Scripts for fitting and quantification of single EDS spectra exported by proprietary commercial software (.msa, .emsa, .txt files)

• Automated experimental standard collection scripts

• Automated particle size distribution measurements scripts

• Extensible architecture — adaptable to other techniques such as

  • Wavelength Dispersive Spectroscopy (WDS)
  • Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy (STEM) with EDS

• Extensible hardware support — includes driver for ThermoFisher Phenom Desktop SEM series, and can be extended to any electron microscope with a Python API

📊 Performance

• Benchmarked on 74 single-phase samples with compositions spanning 38 elements (from nitrogen to bismuth), it achieved <5–10% relative deviation from expected values
• Machine learning compositional analysis detects individual phase composition in multi-phase samples, including minor phases
• Intermixed phases can also be resolved

🧪 Supported Use Cases

• Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) with Energy-Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS)
• Powders and rough samples, e.g. rough films, or pellets, with automated segmentation.
• Bulk, flat samples, navigated by defining a grid of points to probe.
• Manual navigation of any sample.

⚙️ Requirements

• Cross-platform: runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows
• Quick installation
• Requires calibration for use with different electron microscopes for maximum compositional accuracy, though EDS quantification can be tested without recalibration.

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📑 Table of Contents

• 📘 Documentation
• 📦 Requirements
• 🆕 Coming Soon
• 📂 Project Structure
• 📁 Scripts
• 🤝 Contributing
• 📄 License
• 📖 Citation
• 📂 Paper Data
• 📬 Contact

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📘 Documentation

Installation instructions, usage examples, and workflow descriptions are available in the AutoEMXSp documentation:

👉 https://cedergrouphub.github.io/AutoEMXSp/

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📦 Requirements

• Python 3.11 or newer
• All dependencies are installed automatically via pip or conda.
• Tested versions of dependencies are specified in pyproject.toml.

  The package may work with more recent versions, but these have not been tested.

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Electron Microscope Support

• ✅ Developed and tested for Thermo Fisher Phenom Desktop SEMs.
• ✅ Compatible with any Phenom microscope equipped with PPI (Phenom Programming Interface).
• ⚠️ For other microscope models, the driver must be adapted to the appropriate API commands.

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🆕 Coming Soon

Here’s what’s planned for future releases of AutoEMXSp:

• 🐍 Verify with the latest Python version for improved compatibility with current scientific libraries
• 📏 New scripts for spectral parameter calibration to extend the XSp_calibs library to your own instrument.

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📂 Project Structure

The repository is organized as follows:

AutoEMXSp/
├── autoemxsp/                 # Main package source code
│   ├── _custom_plotting.py     # Customizable clustering plot function
│   ├── config/                 # Configuration files, including default values to employ during measurements.
│   ├── core/                   # Core objects and source code
│   ├── data/                   # Libraries of X-ray data
│   ├── EM_driver/              # Electron Microscope driver (⚠️ adapt to your own instrument)
│   └── Results/                # Example acquired data (used for unit tests)
│   ├── runners/                # Runner functions calling on core objects
│   ├── scripts/                # Scripts to run acquisition, quantification, etc. (see full list below)
│   ├── XSp_calibs/             # X-ray spectral calibrations (⚠️ adapt to your own instrument)
│   ├── utils/                  # Utility functions and strings employed by the program
│
├── examples/                  # Example scripts for fitting, quantification and compositional analysis of example data
├── tests/                     # Unit tests for fitting, quantification, compositional analysis and image processing
│                               # (Acquisition tests require proper EM drivers)
├── paper_data/                # Raw paper data uploaded on Git LFS (Dowload instructions in Paper Data section below)
│
├── LICENSE.txt
├── README.md
└── pyproject.toml

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📁 Scripts

This repository includes a collection of scripts that streamline the use of AutoEMXSp.
Each script is tailored for a specific task in spectral acquisition, calibration, quantification, or analysis.

🔬 Acquisition, Quantification & Analysis

• Run_Acquisition_Quant_Analysis.py — Acquire X-ray spectra and optionally perform quantification and composition analysis.
• Run_Quantification_Analysis.py — Quantify acquired spectra (single or multiple samples) and perform machine-learning analysis.
• Run_Analysis.py — Launch customized machine-learning analysis on previously quantified data.
• Fit_Quant_Single_AutoEMXSp_Spectrum.py — Fit and optionally quantify a single spectrum measured with AutoEMXSp. Prints fitting parameters and plots fitted spectrum for detailed inspection of model performance.
• Fit_Quant_Single_MSA_Spectrum.py — Fit and optionally quantify a single spectrum exported by proprietary software.

📊 Particle Size Distribution Measurements

• Collect_Particle_Statistics.py - Analyse sample, collecting particle size statistics and distribution.
• Process_Particle_Stats_Files.py - Process acquired aprticle size data and recompute.

🛠️ Miscellaneous

• Run_Experimental_Standard_Collection.py — Acquire and fit experimental standards.
• Run_SDD_Calibration.py — Perform calibration of the SDD detector.

⚗️ Characterize Extent of Intermixing in Known Powder Mixtures

(see Chem. Mater. 2025, 37, 6807−6822 for example)
Use the same scripts as regular composition characterization, as described in the docs Tutorial.

👉 All scripts can be executed directly from the command line or imported into a Python environment, making them accessible from anywhere on your system.

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🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

Open to collaborations to extend this package to different tools or to different types of samples, for example thin films. Please contact me at agiunto@lbl.gov

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📄 License

This project is licensed under a NON-COMMERCIAL USE ONLY, LICENSE — see the LICENSE file for details.

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📖 Citation

If you use AutoEMXSp in your research, please cite the following publication:

A. Giunto, Y. Fei, P. Nevatia, B. Rendy, N. Szymanski and G. Ceder; Accurate SEM‑EDS Quantification, Automation, and Machine Learning Enable High‑Throughput Compositional Characterization of Powders, 2025.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-7837297/v1

BibTeX

@article{Giunto2025AutoEMXSp,
  author  = {Giunto, Andrea and Fei, Yuxing and Nevatia, Pragnay and Rendy, Bernardus and Szymanski, Nathan and Ceder, Gerbrand},
  title   = {Accurate SEM‑EDS Quantification, Automation, and Machine Learning Enable High‑Throughput Compositional Characterization of Powders},
  year    = {2025},
  doi     = {10.21203/rs.3.rs-7837297/v2},
  url     = {https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-7837297/v2}
}

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📂 Paper Data

The raw data used in the associated publication is stored in the paper_data/ directory.
These files are tracked with Git LFS (Large File Storage).

🔽 Download with Git LFS

The repository is automatically cloned without Git LFS; you will only see placeholder files instead of the actual datasets inside paper_data/.
To download the full data, on the terminal go to the repo directory and:

# 1. Install Git LFS (only needed once per machine)
git lfs install

# 2. Fetch the data files
git lfs fetch --all
git lfs checkout

Alternatively, download manually from the github repo Download button.

After downloading, run the Run_Analysis.py or Run_Quantification.py scripts within the folder.

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📬 Contact

For questions or issues, please open an issue on GitHub.

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