Short-training Algorithm for Online Brain-machine Interfaces Using One-photon Microendoscopic Calcium Imaging

Calcium imaging has great potential to be applied to online brain-machine interfaces (BMIs). As opposed to two-photon imaging settings, a one-photon microendoscopic imaging device can be chronically implanted and is subject to little motion artifacts. Traditionally, one-photon microendoscopic calcium imaging data are processed using the constrained nonnegative matrix factorization (CNMFe) algorithm, but this batched processing algorithm cannot be applied in real-time. An online analysis of calcium imaging data algorithm (or OnACIDe) has been proposed, but OnACIDe updates the neural components by repeatedly performing neuron identification frame-by-frame, which may decelerate the update speed if applying to online BMIs. For BMI applications, the ability to track a stable population of neurons in real-time has a higher priority over accurately identifying all the neurons in the field of view. By leveraging the fact that 1) microendoscopic recordings are rather stable with little motion artifacts and 2) the number of neurons identified in a short training period is sufficient for potential online BMI tasks such as cursor movements, we proposed the short-training CNMFe algorithm (stCNMFe) that skips motion correction and neuron identification processes to enable a more efficient BMI training program in a one-photon microendoscopic setting.