Restoration of Two-Photon Ca2+ Imaging Data Through Model Blind Spatiotemporal Filtering

• Main Authors: Liyong Luo, Yuanxu Xu, Junxia Pan, Meng Wang, Jiangheng Guan, Shanshan Liang, Yurong Li, Hongbo Jia, Xiaowei Chen, Xingyi Li, Chunqing Zhang, Xiang Liao
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-04-01
• Series: Frontiers in Neuroscience
• Subjects: image restoration; model blind learning; spatio-temporal processing; residual convolutional network; machine learning; two-photon Ca2+ imaging
• Online Access: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2021.630250/full

Two-photon Ca2+ imaging is a leading technique for recording neuronal activities in vivo with cellular or subcellular resolution. However, during experiments, the images often suffer from corruption due to complex noises. Therefore, the analysis of Ca2+ imaging data requires preprocessing steps, such as denoising, to extract biologically relevant information. We present an approach that facilitates imaging data restoration through image denoising performed by a neural network combining spatiotemporal filtering and model blind learning. Tests with synthetic and real two-photon Ca2+ imaging datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach enables efficient restoration of imaging data. In addition, we demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods by evaluating the qualities of the denoising performance of the models quantitatively. Therefore, our method provides an invaluable tool for denoising two-photon Ca2+ imaging data by model blind spatiotemporal processing.