Functional imaging of non-human primate visual cortex using a miniaturized lensless microscope

Optical imaging technology serves as a powerful tool in neuroscience study for recording large populations of neurons in vivo. Here we present a compact lensless microscope that breaks the fundamental tradeoff in lens-based imaging systems to simultaneously achieve large field-of-view (FOV) and high-resolution imaging. Our prototype lensless microscope incorporates a "contour" phase mask with an integrated illumination system giving us improved performance for allowing us to demonstrate the first functional imaging with a lensless microscope in behaving non-human primates (NHPs). Specifically, we successfully imaged over a 16 mm(2) FOV on primary visual cortex of NHPs, and measured how cortical activity changes as a function of the stimulus position. The extracted position tuning information from our lensless microscope has good correspondence to the ground truth captured by a tabletop widefield microscope system.