DeCalciOn: A hardware system for real-time decoding ofin-vivocalcium imaging data

AbstractEpifluorescence miniature microscopes (“miniscopes”) are widely used forin vivocalcium imaging of neural population activity. Imaging data is usually collected while subjects are engaged in a task and stored for later offline analysis, but emerging techniques for online imaging offer potential for novel real-time experiments in which closed-loop interventions (such as neurostimulation or sensory feedback) are triggered at short latencies in response to neural population activity. Here we introduceDeCalciOn, a plug-and-play hardware device for online population decoding ofin vivocalcium signals that can trigger closed-loop feedback at millisecond latencies, and is compatible with miniscopes that use the UCLA Data Acquisition (DAQ) interface. In performance tests, the position of rats (n=13) on a linear track was decoded in real time from hippocampal CA1 population activity by 24 linear classifiers. DeCalciOn required <2.5 ms after each end-of-frame to decode up to 1,024 calcium traces and trigger TTL control outputs. Decoding was most efficient using a ‘contour-free’ method of extracting traces from ROIs that were unaligned with neurons in the image, but ‘contour-based’ extraction from neuronal ROIs is also supported. DeCalciOn is an easy-to-use system for real-time decoding of calcium fluorescence that enables closed-loop feedback experiments in behaving animals.