Real-time Noise-suppressed Wide-Dynamic-Range Compression in Ultrahigh-Resolution Neuronal Imaging

Abstract

SummaryWith a limited dynamic range of an imaging system, there are always regions with signal intensities comparable to the noise level, if the signal intensity distribution is close to or even wider than the available dynamic range. Optical brain/neuronal imaging is such a case where weak-intensity ultrafine structures, such as, nerve fibers, dendrites and dendritic spines, often coexist with ultrabright structures, such as, somas. A high fluorescence-protein concentration makes the soma order-of-magnitude brighter than the adjacent ultrafine structures resulting in an ultra-wide dynamic range. A straightforward enhancement of the weak-intensity structures often leads to saturation of the brighter ones, and might further result in amplification of high-frequency background noises. An adaptive illumination strategy to real-time-compress the dynamic range demands a dedicated hardware to operate and owing to electronic limitations, might encounter a poor effective bandwidth especially when each digitized pixel is required to be illumination optimized. Furthermore, such a method is often not immune to noise-amplification while locally enhancing a weak-intensity structure. We report a dedicated-hardware-free method for rapid noise-suppressed wide-dynamic-range compression so as to enhance visibility of such weak-intensity structures in terms of both contrast-ratio and signal-to-noise ratio while minimizing saturation of the brightest ones. With large-FOV aliasing-free two-photon fluorescence neuronal imaging, we validate its effectiveness by retrieving weak-intensity ultrafine structures amidst a strong noisy background. With compute-unified-device-architecture (CUDA)-acceleration, a time-complexity of <3 ms for a 1000×1000-sized 16-bit data-set is secured, enabling a real-time applicability of the same.