Inferring spike times from noisy neuronal calcium signals

Two-photon calcium imaging is an emerging experimental technique that enables the study of information processing within neural circuits in vivo. While the spatial resolution of this technique permits the calcium activity of individual cells within the field of view to be monitored, inferring the precise times at which a neuron emits a spike is challenging because spikes are hidden within noisy observations of the neuron’s calcium activity. To tackle this problem, we introduce the use of structured sparse approximation methods for recovering spikes from the time-varying calcium activity of neurons.

Authors: Eva Dyer, Marco Duarte, Don Johnson, Richard Baraniuk

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