Journal
JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY INTERFACE
Volume 18, Issue 181, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2021.0523
Keywords
widefield calcium imaging; computational neuroscience; dynamical systems; coherent structures; finite-time Lyapunov exponents
Categories
Funding
- Neuroengineering Undergraduate Research Fellowship from the University of Washington Institute of Neuroengineering (UWIN)
- Washington Research Foundation Funds for Innovation in Neuroengineering
- UW Neuroscience Graduate Program [T32NS099578]
- UW Computational Neuroscience Center [5T90DA032436]
- Human Frontiers Science Program [LT001071]
- European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellowship) [656528]
- Simons Foundation Autism grant
- Army Research Office [ARO W911NF-19-1-0045]
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research [AFOSR FA9550-19-1-0386]
- Washington Research Foundation
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- Weill Neurohub
- Marie Curie Actions (MSCA) [656528] Funding Source: Marie Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Widefield calcium imaging is a powerful experimental technique for recording large-scale brain activity, allowing researchers to study the spatiotemporal coherent structures underlying neural activity. By leveraging analytic techniques from fluid dynamics, a visualization framework called FLOW portraits has been developed to map wavefronts correlated with behavioral events. These FLOW portraits provide an intuitive map of dynamic calcium activity, including regions of initiation and termination, as well as the direction and extent of activity spread, capturing coherent structures that are not well represented by traditional modal decomposition techniques.
Widefield calcium imaging has recently emerged as a powerful experimental technique to record coordinated large-scale brain activity. These measurements present a unique opportunity to characterize spatiotemporally coherent structures that underlie neural activity across many regions of the brain. In this work, we leverage analytic techniques from fluid dynamics to develop a visualization framework that highlights features of flow across the cortex, mapping wavefronts that may be correlated with behavioural events. First, we transform the time series of widefield calcium images into time-varying vector fields using optic flow. Next, we extract concise diagrams summarizing the dynamics, which we refer to as FLOW (flow lines in optical widefield imaging) portraits. These FLOW portraits provide an intuitive map of dynamic calcium activity, including regions of initiation and termination, as well as the direction and extent of activity spread. To extract these structures, we use the finite-time Lyapunov exponent technique developed to analyse time-varying manifolds in unsteady fluids. Importantly, our approach captures coherent structures that are poorly represented by traditional modal decomposition techniques. We demonstrate the application of FLOW portraits on three simple synthetic datasets and two widefield calcium imaging datasets, including cortical waves in the developing mouse and spontaneous cortical activity in an adult mouse.
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