Abstract The rapid progress of calcium imaging has reached a point where the activity of tens of thousands of cells can be recorded simultaneously. However, the huge amount of data in such records makes it difficult to carry out cell detection manually. Consequently, because the cell detection is the first step of multicellular data analysis, there is a pressing need for automatic cell detection methods for large-scale image data. Automatic cell detection algorithms have been pioneered by a handful of research groups. Such algorithms, however, assume a conventional field of view (FOV) (i.e. 512 × 512 pixels) and need a significantly higher computational power for a wider FOV to work within a practical period of time. To overcome this issue, we propose a method called low computational-cost cell detection (LCCD), which can complete its processing even on the latest ultra-large FOV data within a practical period of time. We compared it with two previously proposed methods, constrained non-negative matrix factorization (CNMF) and Suite2P. We found that LCCD makes it possible to detect cells from a huge-amount of high-density imaging data within a shorter period of time and with an accuracy comparable to or better than those of CNMF and Suite2P.

Low Computational-cost Cell Detection Method for Calcium Imaging Data