{"id":106025,"date":"2021-03-26T12:35:10","date_gmt":"2021-03-26T16:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/?p=106025"},"modified":"2024-05-06T16:31:11","modified_gmt":"2024-05-06T20:31:11","slug":"one-small-step-for-a-mouse-using-information-science-to-understand-the-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/2021\/03\/26\/one-small-step-for-a-mouse-using-information-science-to-understand-the-brain\/","title":{"rendered":"One Small Step For A Mouse: Using Information Science to Understand the Brain"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Allison Kleber<\/em><\/p>\n

How does learning a new skill or process change the physical structure of the brain? Using techniques from data science and high-dimensional statistics, Professors Bobak Nazer (ECE), Venkatesh Saligrama (ECE, SE), and Xue Han (BME), aim to find out. Their project, titled \u201cDiscovering Changes in Networks: Fundamental Limits, Efficient Algorithms, and Large-Scale Neuroscience,\u201d has won the support of a $1.2M National Science Foundation (NSF) Award.<\/span><\/p>\n

Contemporary technology allows researchers to collect enormous amounts of data across a broad range of disciplines, providing them with raw material for the observation and analysis that can lead to new discoveries, technologies, and a deeper understanding of the world. In the course of their recently-funded project, Professors Nazer, Saligrama and Han intend to develop models and algorithms that will allow them to analyze neural datasets collected from the brains of mice, all while working to foster collaboration between the information sciences and large-scale neuroscience.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Bobak
Bobak Nazer (ECE)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cDiscovering Changes in Networks\u201d is designed to do just that; rather than using a modeling a<\/span>pproach that takes raw, \u201cnoisy\u201d data and attempts to extrapolate the full struc<\/span>ture of a probabilistic graphical model\u00a0 (in this case, modeling the functional connectivity\u00a0 of the imaged neurons), the project focuses on an approach called \u201cnetwork change discovery.\u201d In other words, the proposed algorithms will use the data to determine whether a network\u2019s structure has changed significant<\/span>ly over the course of an experiment, and if so, where. One of the exciting theoretical findings of the proposal is that, if the model structure changes significantly, then detecting this change can be much easier than recovering the network, either fully or approximately.\u00a0 These algorithms will be used to study the networks between neurons in the hippocampi of mice. The team\u2019s goal will be to determine how the (functional) connectivity between neurons in that part of the brain changes over the course of association and instinctive learning experiments; how the structure of those networks is altered as the mice learn a task.<\/p>\n

\"Bobak
Venkatesh Saligrama (ECE)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Professors Nazer, Saligrama and Han intend to take three complementary approaches to this problem, drawing upon their respective domains of expertise.\u00a0 First, they will use information theory and high-dimensional statistics to determine the fun<\/span>damental limits of the process of testing and recovering network changes, in order to understand in what circumstances this change discovery approach is easier than full structural recovery (i.e., when it\u2019s significantly easier to directly detect changes from noisy observations compared to estimating the network structure before and after the experiment, and comparing these estimates).). Next, they will use this framework to des<\/span>ign computationally-efficient algorithms, validated first against synthetic datasets, and eventually adapted for the complexities of real data. Finally, these algorithms will be applied to large-scale calcium imaging neural datasets collected from the hippocampi of mice during the learning experiments in question.<\/p>\n

\"Xue
Xue Han (BME)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The methodology that the researchers hope to produce will have applications beyon<\/span>d their own project; they will also be developing new coursework and open-source resources for fellow investigators in information science and large-scale neuroscience. As part of their proposal to the NSF, Professors Nazer, Saligrama and Han have developed a Broadening Participation in Computing Plan to recruit undergraduate student researchers, with a particular focus on female students. Student researchers\u2014the future of this interdisciplinary field–will have access to cutting-edge techniques and valuable mentorship to guide them on to graduate study, promising careers, and the breakthroughs of the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How does learning a new skill or process change the physical structure of the brain? Using techniques from data science and high-dimensional statistics, Professors Bobak Nazer (ECE), Venkatesh Saligrama (ECE, SE), and Xue Han (BME), aim to find out. Their project, titled \u201cDiscovering Changes in Networks: Fundamental Limits, Efficient Algorithms, and Large-Scale Neuroscience,\u201d has won the support of a $1.2M National Science Foundation (NSF) Award.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18241,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[236,257,531,541,535,522,550,517,540,1161,325,287,977,907,239,910,1165],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106025"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18241"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106025"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":151822,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106025\/revisions\/151822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}