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Researchers at 911½ñÈÕºÚÁÏ will develop an imaging system capable of capturing the electrical activity of thousands of neurons simultaneously, in three dimensions and in real time.

 (Department of Brain Sciences, 911½ñÈÕºÚÁÏ College London and UK DRI at 911½ñÈÕºÚÁÏ) and a team of researchers at 911½ñÈÕºÚÁÏ, led by  (Department of Bioengineering), have been awarded £3.92M to develop a new kind of high-throughput, real-time, volumetric voltage and hemodynamic imaging system based on light-field microscopy (LFM).

The imaging breakthrough 

“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 Alzheimer's disease-related pathology impacts neurovascular dynamics and circuit interactions that were previously inaccessible with conventional in vivo imaging approaches”, says Dr Barnes, Associate Professor in Neural Plasticity at the Department of Brain Sciences. 

By the time Alzheimer’s is diagnosed, the brain has already been losing neuronal connections, long before any symptoms appear.  An estimated 57 million people worldwide are living with dementia, a figure projected to reach 153 million by 2050.[1]   But when preclinical and early stages are included, an estimated 416 million people (around one in five adults over 50) are affected at some stage of the disease, most without knowing it. [2]

As the researchers put it, current brain imaging tools are too slow to capture “small, fast voltage signals across large populations”, meaning the most critical moments in neural communication simply disappear before they can be recorded. 

This is an exciting new technology, which can be used to address many biological questions in a range of systems. Dr Samuel Barnes Associate Professor in Neural Plasticity Department of Brain Sciences

The new system, based on light-field microscopy, addresses this directly by recording the voltage of thousands of neurons simultaneously, in three dimensions, in real time. The team will use AI-based image processing to cut through the scattering and computational demands that have made this kind of imaging impractical until now.  

The result, what they call an Optical Oscilloscope, will let researchers watch living neural circuits at a resolution and speed not previously available, with direct applications to Alzheimer's disease and the study of how the brain changes during learning. 

Recent findings 

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  (Melgosa et al. Nature Communications 2026). 

The researchers studied mice with early-stage amyloid pathology and found something surprising: the disease does not damage synaptic connections equally. It strikes hardest at those most actively involved in the brain's work, as if it were deliberately switching off the busiest nodes in the network, rather than destroying everything in its path. 
 
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