Scientists reported that a new microscopy tool, Scanned Line Angular Projection (SLAP) microscopy, makes it possible for researchers to record the neural activity patterns of the visual cortex in mice. Researchers document in the July 29th edition of the journal, Nature Methods, that SLAP can record the neural patterns millisecond-by-millisecond.
Traditional light microscopy is not powerful enough to penetrate the dense tissue of a living brain. Two-photon microscopy takes nanoseconds to process just a single pixel of every frame, which makes it a time-consuming process. For researchers to create videos, they have to take measurements from every pixel that is in a frame.
“You’d think that’d be a fundamental [speed] limit—the number of pixels multiplied by the minimum time per pixel. But we’ve broken this limit by compressing the measurements,” says coauthor Kaspar Podgorski, a neuroscientist and cognitive scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus, in an announcement.
SLAP works by using flat planes of light to probe tissue samples while compressing the data from many pixels into a single data point. A computer algorithm then decompresses the data, which allows researchers to produce high-resolution video of neural activity.