Category Archives: Imaging

Annual report of my intuition about the brain (2025, part III)

How does the brain work, and how can we understand it? To approach this big question from a broad perspective, I want to report on some ideas about the brain that marked me most over the past twelve months and that, on the … Continue reading

Posted in Brain machine interface, Calcium Imaging, Data analysis, electrophysiology, fMRI, Imaging, Locus coeruleus, Network analysis, Neuronal activity, neuroscience, Reviews | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Annual report of my intuition about the brain (2025, part II)

How does the brain work, and how can we understand it? To approach this big question from a broad perspective, I want to report on some ideas about the brain that marked me most over the past twelve months and that, on the … Continue reading

Posted in Calcium Imaging, closed-loop, Imaging, neuroscience, Reviews | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Annual report of my intuition about the brain (2025, part I)

How does the brain work, and how can we understand it? To approach this big question from a broad perspective, I want to report on some ideas about the brain that marked me most over the past twelve months and that, on the … Continue reading

Posted in Data analysis, fMRI, Imaging, machine learning, Microscopy, Network analysis, Neuronal activity, neuroscience, Reviews | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Dirigo: a future Python alternative to Scanimage?

Over the last 20 years, many microscopes that are capable of resonant scanning two-photon microscopy have converged on using ScanImage, a powerful software package with many strengths but also two downsides: First, it is no longer open-source, and second, it … Continue reading

Posted in Calcium Imaging, Imaging, Microscopy, neuroscience | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Displaying the hippocampus as EM image on the office wall

One of the most amazing methods in modern neuroscience is dense volumetric electron microscopy of the brain. I have mentioned some openly accessible datasets before (see my previous blog post), but many additional datasets have been released since then – … Continue reading

Posted in Data analysis, hippocampus, Imaging, Microscopy, Network analysis, neuroscience | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Interesting papers on VIP interneurons in cortex and hippocampus

Interneurons are inhibitory neurons in the brain that are thought to shape the computations performed by principal cells. The effects of inhibition can be rather diverse, depending on which neurons – or which parts of a neuron (dendrites, soma, or … Continue reading

Posted in Calcium Imaging, Data analysis, hippocampus, Imaging, Neuronal activity, neuroscience, Reviews | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Accurately computing noise levels for calcium imaging data

It is fascinating how much data quality can vary between different calcium imaging data sets. In this blog post, I will discuss a metric to quantify and compare data quality and in particular shot noise between calcium imaging datasets. This … Continue reading

Posted in Calcium Imaging, Data analysis, electrophysiology, Imaging, machine learning, Neuronal activity, neuroscience | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Open PhD position in my research group

Are you a finishing Master’s student with a quantitative background and are interested in neuroscience? This is your opportunity. Project: You will be supervised by Dr. Peter Rupprecht and Prof. Fritjof Helmchen at the Brain Research Institute, University of Zurich. … Continue reading

Posted in Calcium Imaging, Data analysis, hippocampus, Imaging, machine learning, Microscopy, Neuronal activity, neuroscience | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

How to compute ΔF/F from calcium imaging data

Many neuroscientists use calcium imaging to record the activity from neurons (or other cells in the brain). The video below was recorded by Sian Duss and me in hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cells in mice. To make calcium imaging traces comparable … Continue reading

Posted in Calcium Imaging, Data analysis, hippocampus, Imaging, Microscopy, neuroscience | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Online spike inference with GCaMP8

Calcium imaging is used to record the activity of neurons in living animals. Often, these activity patterns are analyzed after the experiments to investigate how the brain works. Alternatively, it is also possible to extract the activity patterns in real … Continue reading

Posted in Brain machine interface, Calcium Imaging, closed-loop, Data analysis, electrophysiology, Imaging, machine learning, neuroscience | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment