Tracking longitudinal population dynamics of single neuronal calcium signal using SCOUT

• DOI: 10.1016/j.crmeth.2022.100207
• Publication Date: 2022-04-29T15:36:52Z
• Authors: Kevin G. Johnston; Steven F. Grieco; Hai Zhang; Suoqin Jin; Xiangmin Xu; Qing Nie
• Keywords: Tracking (education); Identification; SIGNAL (programming language)

In vivo calcium imaging enables simultaneous recording of large neuronal ensembles engaged in complex operations. Many experiments require monitoring and identification cell populations across multiple sessions. Population tracking sessions is complicated by non-rigid transformations induced movement field shifts. We introduce SCOUT (Single-Cell spatiOtemporal longitUdinal Tracking), a fast, robust cell-tracking method utilizing cell-cell similarity metrics, probabilistic inference, an adaptive clustering methodology, to perform By comparing with earlier algorithms on simulated, 1-photon, 2-photon recordings, we show that our approach significantly improves quality, particularly when recordings exhibit spatial footprint between or sub-optimal neural extraction quality.