Automated curation of CNMF-E-extracted ROI spatial footprints and calcium traces using open-source AutoML tools

In vivo 1-photon calcium imaging is an increasingly prevalent method in behavioural neuroscience. Numerous analysis pipelines have been developed to improve the reliability and scalability of pre-processing and ROI extraction for these large calcium imaging datasets. Despite these advancements in pre-processing methods, manual curation of the extracted spatial footprints and calcium traces of neurons remains important for quality control. Here, we propose an additional semi-automated curation step for sorting spatial footprints and calcium traces from putative neurons extracted using the popular CNMF-E algorithm. We used the automated machine learning tools TPOT and AutoSklearn to generate classifiers to curate the extracted ROIs trained on a subset of human-labeled data. AutoSklearn produced the best performing classifier, achieving an F1 score > 92% on the ground truth test dataset. This automated approach is a useful strategy for filtering ROIs with relatively few labeled data points, and can be easily added to pre-existing pipelines currently using CNMF-E for ROI extraction.