Publications by authors named "Cinzia Montinaro"
Article Synopsis
- Scientists have been working together to create cool technologies that connect to the brain!
- They are focusing on special implants that can both activate brain areas and monitor their activity at the same time!
- There are challenges to overcome, but combining different functions in these brain probes could lead to amazing new discoveries!
The field of implantable optical neural interfaces has recently enabled the interrogation of neural circuitry with both cell-type specificity and spatial resolution in sub-cortical structures of the mouse brain. This generated the need to integrate multiple optical channels within the same implantable device, motivating the requirement of multiplexing and demultiplexing techniques. In this article, we present an orthogonalization method of the far-field space to introduce mode-division demultiplexing for collecting fluorescence from the implantable tapered optical fibers.
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- Fiber photometry is a technique used in neuroscience to measure neuronal activity through optical indicators placed next to brain regions, but the signal can be affected by the brain's uneven optical properties.
- The study investigates how different brain structures, like the primary motor and somatosensory cortex, impact the efficiency of fiber photometry by measuring the size and shape of the detection field in various brain areas.
- The findings reveal that understanding the expression of fluorescent probes is not enough; researchers need to consider the optical properties of the surrounding tissue to accurately interpret the collected signals.
As the scientific community seeks efficient optical neural interfaces with sub-cortical structures of the mouse brain, a wide set of technologies and methods is being developed to monitor cellular events through fluorescence signals generated by genetically encoded molecules. Among these technologies, tapered optical fibers (TFs) take advantage of the modal properties of narrowing waveguides to enable both depth-resolved and wide-volume light collection from scattering tissue, with minimized invasiveness with respect to standard flat fiber stubs (FFs). However, light guided in patch cords as well as in FFs and TFs can result in autofluorescence (AF) signal, which can act as a source of time-variable noise and limit their application to probe fluorescence lifetime .
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