Development of compressed ultrafast microscopy for real-time multi-scale neuroimaging

神经科学的一个普遍目标是在真实的时间内记录在不同空间和时间尺度上发生的快速、自发的神经活动。传统的电生理学依赖于微电极来记录神经元的膜电位。然而，在一般情况下，这种侵入性的方法是有限的，在记录站点的数量，容易受到环境的电噪声，并挑战纵向监测。另一方面，光学记录已经成为一种有吸引力的方法来测量神经活动，具有非侵入性，记录并行性和时空可扩展性的固有优势。光学电压成像包括两个主要组成部分：电压指示器和光学成像仪器。生物化学的最新进展使快速响应、高灵敏度的荧光电压指示剂成为可能。然而，现有的光学仪器仍然缺乏足够的速度，可扩展性和灵敏度。因此，尚未实现神经活动的实时、多尺度光学成像。

A prevalent goal in neuroscience is to record fast, spontaneous neural activities occurring at varied spatial and temporal scales in real time. Conventional electrophysiology relied on microelectrodes to record neuron’s membrane potentials. However, in general, this invasive approach is limited in the number of recording sites, vulnerable to environmental electrical noises, and challenged for longitudinal monitoring. Optical recording, on the other hand, has emerged as an attractive approach to measuring neural activities with inherent advantages in non-invasiveness, recording parallelism, and spatiotemporal scalability. Optical voltage imaging encompasses two major constituents: voltage indicators and optical imaging instruments. Recent advances in biochemistry have enabled fast-response, high-sensitivity fluorescent voltage indicators. However, existing optical instruments still lack sufficient speed, scalability, and sensitivity. Thus, real-time, multi-scale optical imaging of neural activities has not been achieved.