Introduction — a late-night lab, a blinking console, and a choice I remember a Friday night in June 2018 when an infusion pump sat under a fluorescence lamp and the clock struck midnight — that scene stuck with me. In that moment I was thinking about medical device testing and…

Introduction I once watched a postdoc chase a phantom noise source for three late nights in a row—every fix revealed a new artifact. In our lab the fiber photometry system sat at the center of that struggle, and the data told the story: inconsistent baselines, drifting fluorescence, and missed transients….