Category Archives: Neuronal activity

Annual report of my intuition about the brain (2022)

How does the brain work and how can we understand it? To view this big question from a broad perspective at the end of each year, I’m reporting some of the thoughts about the brain that marked me most during … Continue reading

Posted in electrophysiology, Network analysis, Neuronal activity, Review, Reviews | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Ambizione fellowship and an open PhD position

I’m glad to share that I am going to start my own junior research group at the University of Zurich in March 2023! As an Ambizione fellow, I will receive funding for my own salary, some equipment, consumables and a … Continue reading

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

Post-publication review: The geometry of robustness in spiking neural networks

Selected paper: Calaim, Dehmelt, Gonçalves and Machens, The geometry of robustness in spiking neural networks, eLife (2022) The main message: This theoretical neuroscience paper describes an intuitive way how to think about the effect of single spikes in a network … Continue reading

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Self-supervised denoising of calcium imaging data

This blog post is about algorithms based on deep networks to denoise raw calcium imaging movies. More specifically, I will write about the difficulties to interprete their outputs, and on how to address these limitations in future work. I will … Continue reading

Posted in Calcium Imaging, Data analysis, Imaging, machine learning, Microscopy, Neuronal activity, Review, zebrafish | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Video introduction to CASCADE

A video with tutorial on CASCADE, a supervised method to infer spike rates from calcium imaging data. Continue reading

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Public peer review files

Peer-review is probably the most obscure part of the publication of scientific results. In this blog post, I would like to make the point that the best way to learn about it – except by being directly involved – is … Continue reading

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Large-scale calcium imaging & noise levels

Calcium imaging based on two-photon scanning microscopy is a standard method to record the activity of neurons in the living brain. Due to the point-scanning approach, sampling speed is limited and the dwell time on a single neuron reduces with … Continue reading

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5 reasons why to use Cascade for spike inference

Our paper on A database and deep learning toolbox for noise-optimized, generalized spike inference from calcium imaging is out now in Nature Neuroscience. It consists of a large and diverse ground truth database with simultaneous calcium imaging and juxtacellular recordings … Continue reading

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Fast scanning, triplet states and photon yield

In point-scanning microscopy like two-photon or confocal microscopy, a focused laser beam is scanned across the field of view and thereby sequentially recovers an image of the object. In this blog post, I will discuss the idea that scanning faster … Continue reading

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Online spike rate inference with Cascade

To infer spike rates from calcium imaging data for a time point t, knowledge about the calcium signal both before and after time t is required. Our algorithm Cascade (Github) uses by default a window that is symmetric in time … Continue reading

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