Untethering open-source Miniscopes with wireless power and data transfer

*Takuya Sasatani, *Marcel Brosch, Zhe Dong, Federico Sangiuliano Jimka, Megha Sehgal, Hemal Semwal, Aparajeeta Guha, Hamid Chorsi, Karina Keus, Blake Madruga, and Daniel Aharoni (*co-first authors)

Abstract

Investigating the relationship between complex behavior and neural activity is an established methodology for systems neuroscience. The development of miniature head-mounted fluorescent microscopes enables in vivo recording of neural activity in freely moving animals and significantly expands the range of behaviors that can be studied. However, supplying power to head-mounted systems and acquiring recording data is a critical bottleneck in many applications, imposing a need for a wired interface that can disrupt behavior or a battery that limits the recording time and increases weight. To this end, prior work demonstrated wirelessly driving neuroscience tools with low power consumption and data rate demand. However, wirelessly interfacing power-hungry and high-bandwidth recording devices such as image sensors with miniaturized form factors for small rodents remains a fundamental challenge. Here we present a fully-wireless miniature microscope enabled by novel, wide-range magnetic resonance coupling wireless power transfer, and free-space optical communication technologies. Unlike prior battery-based wireless miniature microscopes with short recording lengths, our method technically offers unlimited recording time by remotely supplying energy to the untethered head-mounted device. Furthermore, the high-bandwidth communication enabled by the custom-made miniaturized optical communication system will allow online monitoring and processing of recording data. Evaluations reveal that a fully-wireless design can achieve an imaging performance comparable to a typical open-source UCLA Miniscope V4 configuration, and we demonstrate the feasibility of the system in several standardized freely-moving rodent tasks. The presented technology overcomes the issues provoked by wires and batteries and has the promise of unlocking experiment designs that were previously inaccessible, such as the long-term recording of complex social activities of multiple freely-moving animals. In the future, the presented wireless technologies could be designed in a modular form that can seamlessly augment various high-end neural recording devices.

Neuroscience 2023 (SfN)

Published: November 2023

City: Washington D.C., USA