Coherent diffractive imaging (CDI) is a “lensless” technique for 2D or 3D reconstruction of the image of nanoscale structures such as nanotubes, nanocrystals, defects, potentially proteins, and more. In CDI, a highly coherent beam of x-rays, electrons or other wavelike particle or photon is incident on an object.The beam scattered by the object produces a diffraction pattern downstream which is then collected by a detector.