Deep-BRAIN – A novel endoscope for recording activity in deep brain structures in freely-behaving animals

Recording neuronal activity in freely-behaving animals has become accessible in the last years. However, the access to deep structures using e.g. GRIN lenses creates severe damages to the surrounding brain tissue and limits the use of these technologies. To solve that issue, micro-endoscopes based on multimode optical fibers (MMOF) are promising devices for deep brain imaging with minimal invasiveness, but their use reveals to be complex. Here, we propose to design a new MMOF-endoscope prototype based on a new computational approach. It relies on the computational unmixing of the low-contrast fluctuating speckle patterns corresponding to each fluorescence sources after propagation through the MMOF to extract the functional signals. Following the publication of the proof of principle of this approach in Nature Photonics, we propose here to combine the expertise of a physics and a biology team at ENS to design a robust and easy-to-use prototype, which we will be calibrated in head-fixed and freely-behaving animals. The device will be developed in collaboration with a new startup, YMETRY, which a spin-off of IBENS.