A finite rate of innovation algorithm for fast and accurate spike detection from two-photon calcium imaging

OBJECTIVE: Inferring the times of sequences of action potentials (APs) (spike trains) from neurophysiological data is a key problem in computational neuroscience. The detection of APs from two-photon imaging of calcium signals offers certain advantages over traditional electrophysiological approaches, as up to thousands of spatially and immunohistochemically defined neurons can be recorded simultaneously. However, due to noise, dye buffering and the limited sampling rates in common microscopy configurations, accurate detection of APs from calcium time series has proved to be a difficult problem. APPROACH: Here we introduce a novel approach to the problem making use of finite rate of innovation (FRI) theory (Vetterli et al 2002 IEEE Trans. Signal Process. 50 1417–28). For calcium transients well fit by a single exponential, the problem is reduced to reconstructing a stream of decaying exponentials. Signals made of a combination of exponentially decaying functions with different onset times are a subclass of FRI signals, for which much theory has recently been developed by the signal processing community. MAIN RESULTS: We demonstrate for the first time the use of FRI theory to retrieve the timing of APs from calcium transient time series. The final algorithm is fast, non-iterative and parallelizable. Spike inference can be performed in real-time for a population of neurons and does not require any training phase or learning to initialize parameters. SIGNIFICANCE: The algorithm has been tested with both real data (obtained by simultaneous electrophysiology and multiphoton imaging of calcium signals in cerebellar Purkinje cell dendrites), and surrogate data, and outperforms several recently proposed methods for spike train inference from calcium imaging data

Sparse representation in Fourier and local bases Using ProSparse: a probabilistic analysis

Finding the sparse representation of a signal in an overcomplete dictionary has attracted a lot of attention over the past years. This paper studies ProSparse, a new polynomial complexity algorithm that solves the sparse representation problem when the underlying dictionary is the union of a Vandermonde matrix and a banded matrix. Unlike our previous work which establishes deterministic (worst-case) sparsity bounds for ProSparse to succeed, this paper presents a probabilistic average-case analysis of the algorithm. Based on a generatingfunction approach, closed-form expressions for the exact success probabilities of ProSparse are given. The success probabilities are also analyzed in the high-dimensional regime. This asymptotic analysis characterizes a sharp phase transition phenomenon regarding the performance of the algorithm