EZcalcium: Open-Source Toolbox for Analysis of Calcium Imaging Data

Fluorescence calcium imaging using a range of microscopy approaches, such as 2-photon excitation or head-mounted ‘miniscopes’, is one of the preferred methods to record neuronal activity and glial signals in various experimental settings, including acute brain slices, brain organoids, and behaving animals. Because changes in the fluorescence intensity of genetically encoded or chemical calcium indicators correlate with action potential firing in neurons, data analysis is based on inferring such spiking from changes in pixel intensity values across time within different regions of interest. However, the algorithms necessary to extract biologically relevant information from these fluorescent signals are complex and require significant expertise in programming to develop robust analysis pipelines. For decades, the only way to perform these analyses was for individual laboratories to write their own custom code. These routines were typically not well annotated and lacked intuitive graphical user interfaces (GUIs), which made it difficult for scientists in other laboratories to adopt them. Although the panorama is changing with recent tools like CaImAn, Suite2P and others, there is still a barrier for many laboratories to adopt these packages, especially for potential users without sophisticated programming skills. As 2-photon microscopes are becoming increasingly affordable, the bottleneck is no longer the hardware, but the software used to analyze the calcium data in an optimal manner and consistently across different groups. We addressed this unmet need by incorporating recent software solutions, namely NoRMCorre and CaImAn, for motion correction, segmentation, signal extraction and deconvolution of calcium imaging data into an open-source, easy to use, GUI-based, intuitive and automated data analysis software package, which we named EZcalcium.