Department of Neurophysiology, Brain Research Institute, University of Zürich Zürich, Switzerland ; Biozentrum, University of Basel Basel, Switzerland.
Department of Neurophysiology, Brain Research Institute, University of Zürich Zürich, Switzerland ; Department of Neurophysiology, Institute of Biology 2, RWTH Aachen University Aachen, Germany.
Front Neuroinform. 2015 Jan 20;8:85. doi: 10.3389/fninf.2014.00085. eCollection 2014.
Two-photon calcium imaging of neuronal responses is an increasingly accessible technology for probing population responses in cortex at single cell resolution, and with reasonable and improving temporal resolution. However, analysis of two-photon data is usually performed using ad-hoc solutions. To date, no publicly available software exists for straightforward analysis of stimulus-triggered two-photon imaging experiments. In addition, the increasing data rates of two-photon acquisition systems imply increasing cost of computing hardware required for in-memory analysis. Here we present a Matlab toolbox, FocusStack, for simple and efficient analysis of two-photon calcium imaging stacks on consumer-level hardware, with minimal memory footprint. We also present a Matlab toolbox, StimServer, for generation and sequencing of visual stimuli, designed to be triggered over a network link from a two-photon acquisition system. FocusStack is compatible out of the box with several existing two-photon acquisition systems, and is simple to adapt to arbitrary binary file formats. Analysis tools such as stack alignment for movement correction, automated cell detection and peri-stimulus time histograms are already provided, and further tools can be easily incorporated. Both packages are available as publicly-accessible source-code repositories.
双光子钙成像技术是一种越来越普及的技术,可用于以单细胞分辨率探测皮层中的群体反应,并具有合理且不断提高的时间分辨率。然而,双光子数据的分析通常使用特定的解决方案来进行。迄今为止,尚无用于直接分析刺激触发双光子成像实验的公共可用软件。此外,双光子采集系统的数据率不断提高,意味着用于内存中分析的计算硬件成本也在不断增加。我们在这里介绍了一个 Matlab 工具箱 FocusStack,用于在消费级硬件上对双光子钙成像堆栈进行简单高效的分析,其内存占用最小。我们还介绍了一个 Matlab 工具箱 StimServer,用于生成和排序视觉刺激,旨在通过网络链路从双光子采集系统触发。FocusStack 与几个现有的双光子采集系统兼容,并且可以轻松适应任意二进制文件格式。已经提供了用于运动校正、自动细胞检测和刺激后时间直方图的分析工具,并且可以轻松地合并其他工具。这两个软件包都可以作为公开源代码库获得。