A new study published in Nature Methods describes a two-photon imaging platform that captures electrical activity from almost 200 neurons at once, across cortical layers and at unprecedented depths and speeds, opening a window onto how information moves through living brain circuits.

By minimizing the amount of energy needed to reliably detect the activity of a single neuron and devising a scalable strategy to optically scan laser pulses across the sample at a rate of 150 million samples per second, the platform, dubbed FlatMux, sets new benchmarks in the field. It enables recordings from nearly 200 neurons within one or several planes at once, at depths up to 500 micrometers and at frame rates of up to 2,000 per second.