Dr Samuel Barnes (UK DRI at Imperial) and a team of researchers at Imperial College London, led by Dr Amanda Foust, have been awarded £3.92M by Wellcome to develop a new kind of high-throughput, real-time, volumetric voltage and hemodynamic imaging system based on light-field microscopy (LFM). The UK DRI was an early adopter of this technology, funding the build of a next generation LFM system in the Barnes Lab.
As part of the Wellcome funded team, Dr Barnes will use the new technology to investigate how problems with the brain’s neurovascular system might contribute to Alzheimer's, and whether electrically stimulating specific brain circuits could help to treat it. These experiments build on his team’s recent publication (Melgosa et al. Nature Comms 2026).
This is an exciting new technology, which can be used to address many biological questions in a range of systems. We will first use it to study how AD-related pathology impacts neurovascular dynamics and circuit interactions that were previously inaccessible with conventional in vivo imaging approaches. We are also keen to engage with other investigators to explore collaborative opportunities.
Full details of the team and a scientific summary of the project are below.
Optical Oscilloscope: Real-time, high-throughput, volumetric voltage imaging
Imperial Bioengineering (Amanda Foust, Claudia Clopath, Simon Schultz), EEE (Pier Luigi Dragotti, Christos Bouganis), and UK DRI/Brain Sciences (Samuel Barnes)
Neuroscientists lack tools to monitor the voltage of thousands of neurons in 3D and in real time. This is limiting because neurons communicate electrically, and network-scale voltage dynamics drive cognitive function and dysfunction. Neuroscientists currently use multiphoton scanning to image through scattering in brain tissue, but scanning is too slow to capture small, fast voltage signals across large populations. We will develop high-throughput, real-time, volumetric voltage and hemodynamic imaging based on light-field microscopy (LFM). LFM enables scanless volume acquisition, but scattering and computational load currently limit its use. We will overcome these barriers by developing optics-aware deep neural networks trained on one-photon light fields and scattering-robust two-photon volumes, and implement them on graphics processing units and field-programmable gate arrays for the real-time, kilohertz readout required for closed-loop control. These capabilities will enable discovery science including mapping and neuromodulation-based targeting of neurovascular dysfunction in the context of Alzheimer’s disease, uncovering network-scale learning rules, and probing how hippocampal replay shapes cortical dynamics and connectivity. The Optical Oscilloscope will deliver low-latency, cellular-resolution voltage imaging at network scale, enabling new insight into how neural circuits function and remodel during learning and disease.
