Seizure Event Detection Using Intravital Two-photon Calcium Imaging Data

Significance: Intravital cellular calcium imaging has emerged as a powerful tool to investigate how different types of neurons interact at the microcircuit level to produce seizure activity, with newfound potential to understand epilepsy. Although many methods exist to measure seizure-related activity in traditional electrophysiology, few yet exist for calcium imaging.

Aim: To demonstrate an automated algorithmic framework to detect seizure-related events using calcium imaging-including the detection of pre-ictal spike events, propagation of the seizure wavefront, and terminal spreading waves for both population-level activity and that of individual cells.

Approach: We developed an algorithm for precise recruitment detection of population and individual cells during seizure-associated events, which broadly leverages averaged population activity and high-magnitude slope features to detect single-cell pre-ictal spike and seizure recruitment. We applied this method to data recorded using awake two-photon calcium imaging during pentylenetetrazol-induced seizures in mice.

Results: We demonstrate that our detected recruitment times are concordant with visually identified labels provided by an expert reviewer and are sufficiently accurate to model the spatiotemporal progression of seizure-associated traveling waves.

Conclusions: Our algorithm enables accurate cell recruitment detection and will serve as a useful tool for researchers investigating seizure dynamics using calcium imaging.