Integration of Calcium Imaging Traces via Deep Generative Modeling
This addresses the challenge of analyzing single-neuron dynamics in neuroscience, offering a robust method for visualization, clustering, and interpretation, though it is incremental as it builds on existing deep generative models.
The paper tackled the problem of learning single-neuron representations from calcium imaging fluorescence traces, which is hindered by batch effects and lack of exploration with deep generative models, and found that a supervised variational autoencoder approach outperforms state-of-the-art models by preserving biological variability and mitigating batch effects.
Calcium imaging allows for the parallel measurement of large neuronal populations in a spatially resolved and minimally invasive manner, and has become a gold-standard for neuronal functionality. While deep generative models have been successfully applied to study the activity of neuronal ensembles, their potential for learning single-neuron representations from calcium imaging fluorescence traces remains largely unexplored, and batch effects remain an important hurdle. To address this, we explore supervised variational autoencoder architectures that learn compact representations of individual neurons from fluorescent traces without relying on spike inference algorithms. We find that this approach outperforms state-of-the-art models, preserving biological variability while mitigating batch effects. Across simulated and experimental datasets, this framework enables robust visualization, clustering, and interpretation of single-neuron dynamics.