Deconvolution of calcium imaging data using marked point processes

PLoS Comput Biol. 2020 Mar 12;16(3):e1007650. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007650. eCollection 2020 Mar.

Abstract

Calcium imaging has been widely used for measuring spiking activities of neurons. When using calcium imaging, we need to extract summarized information from the raw movie beforehand. Recent studies have used matrix deconvolution for this preprocessing. However, such an approach can neither directly estimate the generative mechanism of spike trains nor use stimulus information that has a strong influence on neural activities. Here, we propose a new deconvolution method for calcium imaging using marked point processes. We consider that the observed movie is generated from a probabilistic model with marked point processes as hidden variables, and we calculate the posterior of these variables using a variational inference approach. Our method can simultaneously estimate various kinds of information, such as cell shape, spike occurrence time, and tuning curve. We apply our method to simulated and experimental data to verify its performance.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Action Potentials / physiology*
  • Algorithms
  • Animals
  • Calcium / metabolism
  • Calcium Signaling / physiology*
  • Computer Simulation
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Mice
  • Models, Neurological
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Neurons / physiology
  • Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted

Substances

  • Calcium

Grants and funding

This work (FK) was supported by MEXT KAKENHI Grant number 16H06533 (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, http://www.mext.go.jp/en/), JST CREST Grant Number JPMJCR1763 (Japan Science and Technology Agency, http://www.jst.go.jp/EN/), and AMED Grant Numbers JP19dm0207001 and JP18dm0307009 (Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development, https://www.amed.go.jp/en/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.