Abstract:
Fluorescent imaging data are currently widely used in neuroscience and other fields. Genetically encoded sensors, based on fluorescent proteins, provide a wide inventory enabling scientiests to image virtually any process in a living cell and extracellular environment. However, especially due to the need for fast scanning, miniaturization, etc, the imaging data can be severly corrupred with multiplicative heteroscedactic noise, reflecting stochastic nature of photon emission and photomultiplier detectors. Deep learning architectures demonstrate outstanding performance in image segmentation and denoising, however they can require large clean datasets for training, and the actual data transformation is not evident from the network architecture and weight composition. On the other hand, some classical data transforms can provide for similar performance in combination with more clear insight in why and how it works. Here we propose an algorithm for denoising fluorescent dynamical imaging data, which is based on multilinear higher-order singular value decomposition (HOSVD) with optional truncation in rank along each axis and thresholding of the tensor of decomposition coefficients. In parallel, we propose a convenient paradigm for validation of the algorithm performance, based on simulated flurescent data, resulting from biophysical modeling of calcium dynamics in spatially resolved realistic 3D astrocyte templates. This paradigm is convenient in that it allows to vary noise level and its resemblance of the Gaussian noise and that it provides ground truth fluorescent signal that can be used to validate denoising algorithms. The proposed denoising method employs truncated HOSVD twice: first, narrow 3D patches, spanning the whole recording, are processed (local 3D-HOSVD stage), second, 4D groups of 3D patches are collaboratively processed (non-local, 4D-HOSVD stage). The effect of the first pass is twofold: first, a significant part of noise is removed at this stage, second, noise distribution is transformed to be more Gaussian-like due to linear combination of multiple samples in the singular vectors. The effect of the second stage is to further improve SNR. We perform parameter tuning of the second stage to find optimal parameter combination for denoising.
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