Longitudinal tracking of neuronal activity from the same cells in the developing brain using Track2p

Understanding cortical circuit development requires tracking neuronal activity across days in the growing brain. While in vivo calcium imaging now enables such longitudinal studies, automated tools for reliably tracking large populations of neurons across sessions remain limited. Here, we present a novel cell-tracking method based on sequential image registration, validated on calcium imaging data from the barrel cortex of mouse pups over one postnatal week. Our approach enables robust long-term analysis of several hundreds of individual neurons, allowing quantification of neuronal dynamics and representational stability over time. Using this method, we identified a key developmental transition in neuronal activity statistics, marking the emergence of arousal state modulation. Beyond this key finding, our method provides an essential tool for tracking developmental trajectories of individual neurons, which could help identify potential deviations associated with neurodevelopmental disorders. This dataset includes the neural data for the successfully tracked cells, processed behavioural data and ground truth data for evaluating cell tracking (see data.zip). For more information on the structre of the dataset and use see the readme file (README.md), for a demo on how to load data using Python see the attached Jupyter notebook (load_data.ipynb).