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Category Archives: Calcium Imaging
Annual report of my intuition about the brain (2019)
How does the brain work and how can we understand it? I want to make it a habit to report some of the thoughts about the brain that marked me most during the past twelve month at the end of … Continue reading
Review: An artificial ground truth for calcium imaging
Selected paper: Charles, Song, Tank et al., Neural Anatomy and Optical Microscopy Simulation (NAOMi) for evaluating calcium imaging methods, bioRxiv (2019). What is the paper about? Calcium imaging is a central method to observe neuronal activity in the brain of … Continue reading
Posted in Calcium Imaging, Data analysis, Imaging, Microscopy, Neuronal activity, Reviews
Tagged Data analysis, Microscopy, photons, PSF, Scanning
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The cell-attached soundtrack of calcium imaging
Old-school electrophysiologists like to listen to the ephys signals during experiments. For example, this allows to precisely hear when the patch pipette approaches a target neuron. The technique is discussed in the Axon Guide: “Audio Monitor: Friend or Foe?”. The … Continue reading
Posted in Calcium Imaging, electrophysiology, Imaging, Neuronal activity, zebrafish
Tagged electrophysiology, Microscopy, photons, zebrafish
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Post-publication review: Somato-dendritic coupling of L5 neurons in V1
It requires more than a quick look at the abstract and the figures to fully understand a research paper and its limitations. One way to get there is to write a summary or critical review of a paper. In a contribution to … Continue reading
Posted in Calcium Imaging, electrophysiology, Microscopy, Reviews
Tagged Dendrites, electrophysiology, photons, theoretical neuroscience
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Photon yield and pulse dispersion
This case report describes how a two-photon microscope was found to come with a fluorescence yield that was lower than expected; how the underlying cause was found out in a systematic manner; and how the problem was solved. All approaches and solutions are specific for the microscope under question. However, I hope that this report (1) will inspire other people who are troubleshooting or optimizing their microscopes, (2) will help other people better understand two-photon microscopes and the relevance of technical details. Continue reading
The power of correlation functions
During my physics studies, I got to know several mathematical tools that turned out to be extremely useful to describe the world and to analyze data, for example vector calculus, fourier analysis or differential equations. Another tool that I find … Continue reading
Posted in Calcium Imaging, Data analysis, electrophysiology
Tagged Data analysis, electrophysiology, Matlab, Microscopy, Python
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Annual report of my intuition about the brain
There are not many incentives for young neuroscientists to think aloud about big questions. Due to lack both of knowledge and authority, discussing very broad questions like how the brain works risks to be embarrassing at best. Still, I feel … Continue reading
Whole-cell patch clamp, part 4: look and feel
In previous blog posts, I have been discussing some aspects of whole-cell patch clamp recordings ([1], [2], [3], [4]). Today, I will show some instructive videos that I recorded during experiments. I’m hoping that they will convey the look and feel … Continue reading
Posted in Calcium Imaging, electrophysiology, Imaging, Microscopy, Neuronal activity, zebrafish
Tagged electrophysiology, Microscopy, photons, zebrafish
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Precise synaptic balance of excitation and inhibition
The main paper of my PhD just got published: Rupprecht and Friedrich, Precise Synaptic Balance in the Zebrafish Homolog of Olfactory Cortex, Neuron (2018). (PDF) You might like it if you are also interested in Classical balanced networks Things you … Continue reading
How well do CNNs for spike detection generalize to unseen datasets?
Some time ago, Stephan Gerhard and I have used a convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect neuronal spikes from calcium imaging data. (I have mentioned this before, here, here, and on Github.) This method is covered by the spikefinder paper … Continue reading
A blog about neurophysiology 