FASP
Functional AStrocyte Phenotyping (FASP) is a Fiji plugin that automatically analyzes and characterizes the spatiotemporal functional status of astrocytes from time-lapse Ca2+-fluorescence microscopy imaging data. Being totally unsupervised, it automatically detects astrocyte functionally independent units (FIUs), extracts functional features of them, and further characterizes the functional status.
FASP explicitly models and well handles the intracellular propagation phenomena of astrocytic Ca2+ fluctuations, the major reason why it’s difficult to repurpose the existing methods of neuron spatiotemporal analysis for astrocytes. Besides, considering the complex nature of Ca2+ signaling and low signal to noise ratio, FASP is designed to be data-driven and probabilistically principled, to flexibly account for complex patterns and perform robustly with noisy data. Parameter tuning is purposely designed to be very easy: the only two parameters for users to tune have either probabilistic meaning or physical (scale) meanings.
How to cite FASP
The FASP Fiji plugin is based on algorithm introduced in our following paper:
Wang, Yinxue, Guilai Shi, David J. Miller, Yizhi Wang, Congchao Wang, Gerard Broussard, Yue Wang, Lin Tian, and Guoqiang Yu. "Automated Functional Analysis of Astrocytes from Chronic Time-Lapse Calcium Imaging Data." Frontiers in neuroinformatics 11 (2017): 48.
Tutorial
Please see user manual.