BCIwiki (bciwiki.com) — Beijing Normal University posted the study as a preprint on bioRxiv on July 18, 2026. The researchers introduce a low-cost structured-illumination miniscope weighing less than 3 g. It uses a Ronchi grating and time-multiplexed excitation to implement HiLo imaging and achieve optical sectioning in freely behaving mice.
The system strongly suppresses out-of-focus background fluorescence while preserving the speed, field of view, and accessibility of widefield miniscopes. It also supports optically sectioned multiplane imaging to increase neuronal yield. In hippocampal recordings, region-of-interest signal quality and spatial-information readout improved, allowing simple region-averaged signals to approach the performance of offline algorithm-extracted signals. The team also demonstrated a proof-of-principle closed-loop brain-machine interface enabled by rapid online signal extraction and real-time neural decoding. This study is a preprint and has not been peer reviewed.