Quantitative analysis of 1300-nm three-photon calcium imaging in the mouse brain

Abstract

1300 nm three-photon calcium imaging has emerged as a useful technique to allow calcium imaging in deep brain regions. Application to large-scale neural activity imaging entails a careful balance between recording fidelity and perturbation to the sample. We calculated and experimentally verified the excitation pulse energy to achieve the minimum photon count required for the detection of calcium transients in GCaMP6s-expressing neurons for 920 nm two-photon and 1320 nm three-photon excitation. By considering the combined effects of in-focus signal attenuation and out-of-focus background generation, we quantified the cross-over depth beyond which three-photon microscopy outpeforms two-photon microscopy in recording fidelity. Brain tissue heating by continuous three-photon imaging was simulated with Monte Carlo method and experimentally validated with immunohistochemistry. Increased immunoreactivity was observed with 150 mW excitation power at 1 and 1.2 mm imaging depths. Our analysis presents a translatable model for the optimization of three-photon calcium imaging based on experimentally tractable parameters.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Jan 30, 2020
Source ID
10.7554/elife.53205

Entities

People

  • Chris Xu
  • Chunyan Wu
  • Dimitre G. Ouzounov
  • Fei Xia
  • Melissa R. Warden
  • Minsu Kim
  • Tianyu Wang
  • Wenchao Gu
  • Xusan Yang

Organizations

  • Cornell University
  • Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity
  • National Institutes of Health
  • National Science Foundation

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Image Processing and Computer Vision.
  • Medical Imaging.
  • Molecular Photonics/Laser Physics