IDBR: A GPU-accelerated 3D-imaging and 3D-Illumination Sytem for Feedback Control of Light Fields in Biological Light Microscopy

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Recent developments in molecular neuroscience allow scientists to both optically record neuronal activity and to cause neurons to fire by stimulating them with light. In genetic model organisms like zebrafish and mice, these technologies can be used to observe and manipulate the activity patterns of thousands of neurons at once using non-invasive all-optical methods. While such techniques promise to revolutionize how we look at brain circuits, neural circuits are fundamentally three-dimensional structures. As a result, optical tools able to both image and selectively stimulate 3D volumes of brain tissue must be developed.This project will develop a device that can record a volume of neurons at each camera exposure, extract information from thousands of these neurons over time, and then use this information to choose which groups of individual neurons in the volume to stimulate with light. This feedback loop will allow scientists to test causal hypotheses about brain network function and its relationship to behavior in a fast and powerful way, leveraging feedback-control technologies currently used in robotics and aeronautics to build and refine dynamical models of the brain online. At the core of this device are new developments in computational microscopy: the light field microscope (LFM), which can computationally reconstruct an entire volume from a single snapshot, and the light field illuminator (LFI), which can create (nearly) arbitrary patterns of light in three dimensions. The project will couple these two devices and accelerate their performance using commercial graphics cards (GPUs) to allow real-time control of biological neural networks in behaving animals.Project outcomes, including scientific findings resulting from the application of the device to biological specimens, detailed directions on how to construct the physical device, and free, open-source software to run the device, will be provided online at http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/lfmicroscope/.