Session 4 - Details
Rate and temporal coding perspectives of motor processing in cortical microcircuits
Tomoki Fukai
Our understanding of motor information processing has rapidly progressed, but the details of motor coding in six-layered cortical microcircuits have yet to be fully clarified. I will show the results of our experimental and computational attempts to uncover the neural representations of behaviorally relevant information in the cortical microcircuits. Particularly, whether and how the firing rates of neurons as well as the temporal features of single-cell and cell-assembly activities participate in motor coding is explored. Using a computational model, I also argue the possibility that somato-dendritic interactions enable cortical neurons to segment and learn hierarchical features of temporal input.
Integrating neuroscience data through personalized brain simulation in protected cloud environments to infer multi-scale mechanisms of brain function and dysfunction
Petra Ritter
The challenge in studying the brain as a complex adaptive system is that complexity arises from the interactions of structure and function at different spatiotemporal scales. Modern neuroimaging can provide exquisite measures of structure and function separately, but misses the fact that the brain complexity emerges from the intersection of the two. We can exploit the power of large-scale network models to integrate disparate neuroimaging data sources and evaluate the potential underlying biophysical network mechanisms. This approach became broadly feasible with the whole-brain simulation platform TheVirtualBrain (TVB). TVB integrates empirical neuroimaging data from different modalities to construct biologically plausible computational models of brain network dynamics. TVB is a generative model wherein biophysical parameters for the level of cell population activity and anatomical connectivity are optimized/fitted so that they generate an individual’s observed data in humans, macaques or rodents. The inferences about brain dynamics, complexity, and the relation to cognition are thus made at the level of the biophysical features (e.g., balance of excitation and inhibition in a cell population) that generated the observed data, rather than particular features of the measured data. The Virtual Brain Cloud (TVB-Cloud) enables neuroscience data integration in the cloud through personalized brain simulation in compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). We will demonstrate the data protection mechanisms implemented in our multi-scale simulation workflows and image processing pipelines comprising e.g. authentication, encryption, sandboxing.
Computational Neuroscience Group