Happy New Year from LeafLabs!

Greetings! There has been so much going on this in the last couple of months we wanted to take the chance to give a LeafLabs update. In addition to being busy with our daily operations, employees have been coming and going, traveling to clients and conferences.

LeafLabs would like to announce that the National Institute of Mental Health has awarded us a National Institute of Health (NIH) grant under Award Number R44MH114783. The award provides the first year of funding for a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant that amounts to $1.99M of funding over three years. The grant will fund a collaboration between LeafLabs, Ken Shepard at Columbia University, and Ed Boyden at MIT to build a 1000-channel silicon probe, for freely-moving neural recording, and implement hardware and software solutions for scalable data analysis.

Lotus is a LeafLabs project that uses a light-field microscope to capture high-resolution 3D images of neuron activity in zebrafish brains. Before a 3D image can be reconstructed from the raw images taken by the microscope, three processing steps must happen. First, a matrix known as the point spread function must be calculated using physical parameters from the experiment. Second, the raw images must be cropped and aligned. Finally, a 3D image can be reconstructed by using the point spread function to perform a 3D deconvolution.