The Design And Implementation Of TDI-fMOST Software System

Brain is the most complex biological system known in nature.Although a lot of effort has been devoted to the study of the brain,humankind still knows very little about the operating mechanism of advanced functions such as learning,consciousness and emotions.This lack of knowledge has led to the lack of effective treatments for most current neurological diseases.Therefore,humans need to understand the mechanism of the brain.Obtaining the complete morphology of the neurons in the brain and the interconnections between the neural circuits helps to understand the function of the brain.At present,there are a variety of techniques to obtain neuron information and their connections in the whole brain.Time delay integration-fluorescence micro-optical sectioning tomography(TDI-fMOST)developed in our laboratory can collect neural structures with high-throughput in the whole brain,including long-range projections of nerve fibers,dendritic spines and axon boutons.To collect the fine nerve structure data of a whole brain,the system usually takes about 12 days,and the total data storage reaches terabyte scale.In the current system,the longer the acquisition time is,the greater the probability of the image loss and the focal plane drift is.In addition,massive data is not conducive to the real-time viewing in the acquisition process and post-processing of images.Therefore,solutions to these problems are the key to efficiently and completely collecting high-quality imaging data.Considering the deficiency of current technical solutions of the TDI-fMOST system,this study design a software system based on the framework of MFC(Microsoft Foundation Classes),that realized the functions of data acquisition and data storage,and solved above problem of massive data and long-time acquisition.And the software system can be compatible with monochrome,multicolor TDI-fMOST systems.For the problems caused by massive data,the software system realizes the function of real-time display of thumbnails and real-time upload data.It can quickly and easily view images and upload the data to the cluster server in real time during the acquisition process.For the problems caused by long acquisition time,adaptive correction of the imaging range is used in the software,which allows the system to collect the whole brain with a minimum acquisition range,and greatly shorten the total acquisition time.The function of automatically processing image loss solves the problem,which is image loss due to the sporadic instability of the hardware system during long time imaging.Auto-focus function solves the phenomenon of focal plane drift during long-time acquisition,and improves the overall quality of the system image data.This software system has been used in the TDI-fMOST system for more than one year and satisfactory results has been obtained.