Funded Awards

A thorough understanding of the complexities of the brain’s different cell types requires the sharing and integration of myriad genomic information generated from various data sources. Owen White proposes creating a Neuroscience Multi-Omic (NeMO) Archive, a cloud-based data repository for -omic data. White and his team of researchers will establish an archive for multi-omic data and metadata of the BRAIN Initiative. The group will document and archive data processing workflows to ensure standardization, as well as create resources for user engagement and data visualization. The NeMO Archive will provide an accessible community resource for raw -omics data and for other BRAIN Initiative project data, making them available for computation by the general research community.

Advances in microscopy and imaging have created new possibilities in many fields of research, but these advances have also generated large amounts of data that can overwhelm traditional data management systems. Along with collaborators at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, Alexander Ropelewski plans to establish a BRAIN Imaging Archive that takes advantages of infrastructure and personnel resources at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. The Archive will include a pipeline for data submission, user access and support, and BRAIN Initiative community engagement through an online presence, workshops, and hackathons. This unique resource will provide an accessible and cost-effective way for the research community to analyze, share, and interact with large image datasets of the BRAIN Initiative.

Connectomics describes a field of study that builds maps of the connections within the brain. Dr. Lichtman and colleagues have developed a facility for generating high-resolution, large-volume serial section electron microscopy data that can be used to generate connectomic maps. In this project, access to the facility, techniques, and analytical software will be provided to the broader neuroscience community. This will allow other research groups who may be inexperienced in these techniques to generate data in projects aimed at mapping brain circuitry, a high priority goal in the BRAIN 2025 report. By providing this resource, Dr. Lichtman and colleagues will help researchers classify the cell types within healthy and diseased brains or model systems, which will improve our understanding of brain function and neurological disorders.

The community’s need for an integrated open-source analysis platform is rapidly growing due to the increasing capacity of extracellular electrodes and the limited number of new and validated spike- sorting methods. JRCLUST, a free, open-source, standalone spike sorting software, offers a scalable, automated and well-validated spike sorting workflow for analysis of data generated by large multielectrode arrays. The software can tolerate experimental recording conditions from behaving animals, and it can handle a wide range of datasets using a set of pre-optimized parameters making it practical for wide use in the community. JRCLUST has been adopted in 20+ labs worldwide since its inception less than a year ago. Drs. Kimmel and Nathan seek to expand and maintain JRCLUST, thus empowering researchers to elucidate how functionally defined subpopulations of neurons mediate specific information-processing functions at key moments during behavior.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS), a method of modulating brain circuit function, is FDA-approved for certain brain disorders such as Parkinson’s Disease. The NIH BRAIN Initiative aims to launch neurotechnological developments that include new ways of directly affecting brain circuit function. Use of these novel interventions warrants careful consideration about ways in which brain stimulation may affect personal identity, autonomy, authenticity and, more generally, agency. In this project, Dr. Roskies and her team will develop an assessment tool to measure changes in agency due to direct brain interventions, and establish a database to catalogue these changes in agency in various patient populations receiving DBS. These efforts have the potential to facilitate improvements in therapeutic approaches and informed consent and will be used to develop a framework for further neuroethical thought about brain interventions, allowing us to better identify, articulate, and measure effects on agency.

The proliferation and heterogeneity of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) experiments, data analysis pipelines, and statistical modeling procedures presents a challenge for effective data sharing and collaboration. Russell Poldrack and colleagues propose expansion of the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS), which standardizes the description and collection of imaging data/metadata for MRI, with development plans for other neuroimaging types as well. Under BIDS, the group will develop standards for pre-processing data pipelines, computational modeling results, and statistical modeling, using quick validation of any implemented standard so that researchers can assess whether their data fit within BIDS guidelines. These standardization goals will facilitate sharing of data, modeling, and results, ensuring their usability and engaging the greater research community in developing highly useable data standards.

Technological advancements in high-resolution imaging of brain volumes permits the accumulation of huge quantities of data that requires solution for storage and archiving. Dr. Brock’s project develops an open, accessible, and cloud-based data archive for electron microscopy and X-ray microtomography data by leveraging the proven architecture of the existing BossDB database. Allowing for petabyte scale data storage, curation, sharing, visualization and analysis, the archive is scalable and allows for a fast in- memory spatial data store, seamless migration of data between low cost and durable object storage (i.e. S3), and rapid access to the enormous datasets. The system enables computing data quality metrics on large datasets and metadata stores through a standardized interface. The archive is developed through an agile process that actively folds in community stakeholders for regular reviews and continuous opportunities for design input.

To what extents are structural and functional brain networks the product of heritability? That is the question that Chung and his colleagues will address with their proposal to develop tools to analyze in detail brain imaging scans (MRI, functional MRI, diffusion tensor imaging) they have collected from 200 pairs of monozygotic and same-sex dizygotic twins. The tools will be part of a new open-source suite of algorithms for analyzing their enormous cache of neuroimaging data, which the researchers will use to establish a baseline map for the genetic influences on brain network development in both health and disease.

AFNI (Analysis of Functional NeuroImages) is an open-source software package for neuroimaging analysis and visualization of both functional and structural MRI as well as other modalities. Drs. Cox and Nielson propose to extend this widely used software package by offering containerization, cloud accessibility and web-accessible visualization. The software extension could support evolving BRAIN Initiative standards for human neuroimaging data organization and experiment specification. The project makes it possible for public integration testing of the software package, thus enabling end-user feedback and wider adoption and dissemination within the neuroimaging community.

Innovative recording techniques have uncovered interactions between individual neurons and cell populations that comprise complex and poorly- defined neural dynamics underlying computations and brain functions. Dr. Sommer proposes combining new tools to analyze this neuronal activity with a theoretical framework of the associated computations. After decoding behavior in mice from hippocampal recordings during exploration and replay and local field potentials from visual cortex, the group will extract “place components” or the position of the animal from the activity data. Subsequently, the team will establish a theoretical framework that, at the computational level, will describe computations underlying brain function in terms of high-dimensional representations, and at the mechanistic level will describe how the operations and representations are mapped onto biological mechanisms. Future users will be able to use this framework to design computations, explore multiple potential mechanisms, create a simulation of an experiment, and compare simulation data to a real experiment.

Novel neuromodulation, recording, and imaging techniques applied to human and non- human primate brains generate datasets that require tools for organizing, processing and analyzing data that are widely available and easy to use. Drs. Milham and Craddock plan to extend C-PAC (Configurable Pipeline for the Analysis of Connectomes), building a configurable data analysis pipeline that incorporates various statistical analysis, machine learning, and network analytic techniques. In addition to adapting methods used in human imaging for non-human primate data, the project will implement a toolbox for alignment of electrophysiological data with brain imaging data. The resulting software enables high- throughput, semiautomated and end-to-end processing and analysis of structural and functional MRI data that are accessed locally or via the cloud.

Behavioral neuroscience research produces large quantities of high- dimensional data requiring complicated interrogations. To uncover simpler underpinnings of complex neural recordings, Drs. Palmer, Bialek, and Schwab propose incorporating renormalization group (RG) techniques to a wide range of multi-unit, neural data. The statistical algorithms of their theoretical framework will be freely available and disseminated, as they should be relatively straightforward to apply regardless of discipline. This project could support tractable, efficient analysis of large datasets by enhancing future users’ ability to discern specific properties of neuronal populations critical to behaviors.

Recent tissue-clearing techniques and advances in microscopy have made it possible to produce 3D images of intact brains. to help ensure consistency in data collection and analysis, Dr. Hamilton and her team will develop a set of standards for3D imaging of whole brains for the neuroscience research community.. Dr. Hamilton’s group will convene a Working Group of experts who will work through a consensus process to establish standards that will be distributed to the research community. These standards should help improve the efficiency of imaging research and allow comparisons across studies.

Recent advances in computational psychiatry have revealed failures in using models of the reward environment to flexibly change undesired behavior in individuals with substance use disorders (SUDs). Drs. Soltani and Izquierdo will inhibit precise brain regions and simultaneously perform calcium imaging in rodents performing an adaptive learning task to explore circuitry between the cortex and amygdala. Results from this project could lead to improved systems-level understanding of behavioral inflexibility in people with SUDs and of the precise roles of involved brain areas for better, more effective therapeutic targeting in the future.

Advancing methods to image and interpret neural activity in humans on fine temporal-spatial scales is critical to understanding how the brain works in health and disease. However, the ability to record non-invasively from deep in the human brain with current technology is lacking. To address this issue, Drs. Hamalainen and Jones will integrate magneto-/electroencephalography (MEG/EEG), computational neural modeling, and invasive electrophysiological recording in humans to optimize methods to localize distributed deep and shallow brain sources, and to develop a computational tool to interpret the underlying cellular events. In addition to developing free open source software that will advance the ability to non-invasively study subcortical interactions in humans with MEG/EEG, this approach will provide novel insight into distributed subcortical activity that is not possible with one method alone.

<p>Sleep is critical to memory and learning, and deciphering the neural codes underlying hippocampal and sensory cortical circuits would reveal important mechanisms of memory consolidations. Therefore, the study of hippocampal-neocortical memory coding during sleep is aimed at identifying a more complete answer to the "where", "what" and "when" questions related to memory processing, where a complete understanding is currently lacking. Drs. Chen and Wilson will combine electrophysiology, population-decoding methods, optogenetics and closed-loop neural interface to uncover sleep-associated memory contents of neural codes in the hippocampus and visual cortex and to dissect the circuit mechanisms of hippocampal-neocortical interaction and memory consolidation during various stages of sleep. The proposed project will provide valuable insight into targeted memory reactivation during sleep for memory enhancement or therapeutic applications.</p>

Neuromodulation in the hippocampus is thought to guide learning and memory processes, and a thorough knowledge of the mechanisms underlying encoding and retrieval is critical towards informing clinical interventions for cognitive disorders. Drs. Canavier and Gasparini will investigate how the neurotransmitter acetylcholine controls routing in areas CA1 and CA3 of the hippocampus. Their approach uses both computational modeling and experiments to better understand the neural basis of how different oscillation frequencies can be used to route information and how acetylcholine could control this routing. The resultant improvement in understanding how information is processed and stored in the hippocampus may eventually guide therapeutic strategies for cognitive disorders.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a non-invasive brain stimulation technique that relies on electromagnetic induction. Though studied clinically for the treatment of various disorders, effective repetitive TMS (rTMS) therapies remain elusive, hampered by technical limitations and a complex parameter space. To better understand the mechanisms underlying rTMS, Dr. Queisser aims to bridge modeling and basic neuroscience to build a multi-scale computational model which combines field simulations, network/single-cell plasticity modeling, and molecular-level calcium simulations. The proposed project is a first important step towards biology-driven, computer-assisted personalized rTMS therapies to promote beneficial neural plasticity. Moreover, this molecular approach provides the perspective in testing synergistic effects of pharmacological interventions and rTMS-based therapies, which may be instrumental in informing future clinical trials to tackle mental health disease.

Sensory systems in simple model organisms, like olfaction in the fruit fly, are well understood but must be translated to higher level vertebrates and expanded to include computational models for full comprehension. Dr. Navlakha hopes to understand what computations are used by the mammalian olfactory system using a mouse model and extending to develop a computer algorithm for application across species. The group plans to learn what circuit mechanisms are used in the mouse olfactory system, which may help identify how disruption of these mechanisms causes circuit malfunction. Using these data to improve computational processing performance, they could uncover insights into how the brain computes more broadly in health and disease.

Diffusion-weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dMRI) is the only currently available, non-invasive, method to measure the properties connections in living human brains. Widely used in clinical tests for a variety of brain disorders, dMRI helps researchers understand networks involved in perception in cognition. Dr. Garyfallidis plans to implement novel algorithms for dMRI data analysis, share benchmark data sets, and support development of cloud-computing software tools. Computational methods proposed could accelerate research using dMRI for clinical application and increase our ability to make inferences from dMRI data.

The scientific community and general public have become increasingly concerned about a lack of replicability among published discoveries, particularly in behavioral science, but extending to many areas of pre-clinical research. Dr. Bogue proposes a practical approach to the challenge of research replicability that will help circumvent extensive and costly efforts and delays in the initial reporting of important findings, while facilitating changes in how scientists evaluate and communicate research. This project will provide an approach, guidelines and publicly available data resources to reduce the number of irreproducible studies that are published and improperly used as foundational research, increasing the public health impact of NIH-funded research and ultimately restoring confidence in the public's investment in research through timely, cost-effective improvements in the scientific process.

The human brainstem plays a critical role in brain function, both in health and disease, yet remarkably little is known about this critical brain region. While functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain has provided tremendous insight into the cerebral cortex, the depth and small size of brainstem structures, such as the superior colliculus, has made imaging of the brainstem challenging. Dr. Ress proposes to build a set of methods and modeling that will enable the use of ultra-high-field fMRI to study the brainstem. The group will demonstrate validity by performing visual response experiments in the superior colliculus of humans and, if successful, could obtain much higher resolution data that could be transformative for basic research and clinical studies alike.

Decisions are often deliberative processes that depend on the ability to accumulate uncertain information over time, but sometimes, new information requires dynamic updates. While research has begun to examine decision-making under dynamic conditions, no studies have identified representations of this adaptive decision variable that can flexibly accumulate information to guide behavior. Dr. Gold and collaborators plan to use theoretical and experimental approaches to understand how and where the brain encodes these decision variables. Specifically, they test whether brain circuits that integrate evidence under static conditions can also implement adaptive processes under dynamic conditions. This integrated computational, behavioral, and neurophysiological approach will provide novel insights into many aspects of higher brain function and complex behaviors that depend on dynamic processing of information.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) represents one of the major clinical breakthroughs in the age of translational neuroscience, though harnessing the full therapeutic potential of adaptive DBS remains a challenge. Drs. Richardson and Turner will employ artificial intelligence strategies to further elevate the therapeutic potential of DBS. The concurrent use of research electrocorticography (ECoG) during DBS surgery recently has enabled basic neuroscience investigation of human cortical-subcortical network dynamics. Therefore, the researchers will develop a computational framework for deep learning-based multi-feature decoding of behavioral and disease states from ECoG, in order to advance the evolution of aDBS. By employing artificial intelligence strategies to innovate in the field of translational, personalized, medicine, this work will inform the design of novel strategies for biomarker-responsive brain stimulation.

Cognitive and behavioral processes that unfold over time reflect, at least in part, dynamical constraints imposed by neural circuitry. Understanding these dynamics requires finely perturbing neural activity in varied ways. Drs. Batista and Yu will employ a brain-computer interface (BCI) paradigm to study neural dynamics. BCI enables perturbation of neural activity by harnessing an animal's volitional control to drive the activity of a population of neurons into specified configurations, allowing causal tests of dynamical constraints and their relation to behavior. By recording multi-neuronal activity in the motor cortex of macaque monkeys, the researchers will have a deeper insight into how movements are prepared and executed, which holds therapeutic implications for movement disorders (e.g., Parkinson’s), as well as the potential to improve the performance of BCIs that assist paralyzed patients and amputees.

The olfactory system is an excellent model for studying the role of neural oscillations within experimentally accessible tissues, but there lacks a thorough, multi-level understanding of dynamical flexibility of the cortical circuits underlying olfaction. Drs. Kay and Cleland will establish a mechanistic model of oscillations and synchronization in the mammalian olfactory system, combining electrophysiology from awake/behaving rats with recordings from acute mouse slices of the olfactory bulb. Integrating these datasets into a common network model will explicate the construction and utility of these systemwide dynamics based on their underlying cellular and network mechanisms. The proposed work takes a fairly well-characterized network and, via computational modeling, combines studies across different levels of analysis to build a mechanistic model of a complex dynamical system.

The striking organization of hippocampal place cells and grid cells have provided unique insights into how the brain constructs and uses representations of the environment to guide behavior. These spatially selective cells are influenced by both internal signals and external stimuli. How do these two sets of information re-calibrate when positions in the environment change? Drs. Cowan, Hedrick, Knierim, and Zhang propose that visual feedback guides these updates. They will conduct a set of interactive computational and experimental studies to investigate in detail the computational mechanisms underlying this novel phenomenon. This project, combining electrophysiology, engineering, and modeling, will propel the theory forward to explain the network dynamics underlying path integration, with implications for mental health illness characterized by an inability to appropriately react to external information about the world.

Increasing evidence suggests that an individual's brain connectome plays a fundamental role in cognitive functioning and the risk of developing mental disorders. However, large gaps between image acquisition and in connectome construction and data analysis have limited progress in understanding the relationships between brain connectome structure and phenotypes. Drs. Dunson and Zhang will develop transformative tools to enhance understanding of how the brain connectome varies according to individual differences. The toolbox will be applied to the Human Connectome Project and UK Biobank datasets and rigorously validated. By reducing measurement errors in connectome construction, and improving the inference of relationships between connectome structure and an individual's mental health and substance use, this project can revolutionize mechanistic understanding and clinical practice in prevention and treatment of mental health disorders.

Electrical stimulation technology for activating small groups of peripheral nerve fibers could form the foundation of bioelectronic systems to influence metabolic processes, enhance immune system function, regulate gastrointestinal activity, or treat a variety of medical conditions. Drs. Jung and Abbas propose to enhance the clinical viability of these techniques by developing stimulation strategies that can selectively activate small groups of fibers that produce the desired clinical effect without producing undesirable side effects. The longitudinal intrafascicular electrodes (LIFEs) produced in this international collaboration will have multiple points of contact on nerve fibers and stimulation pulse flexibility for targeted activation in anesthetized rabbits.

A fundamental capacity of the primate visual system is its ability to process both the form and texture of visual stimuli. Using a combination of primate neurophysiology experiments, behavior and computational modeling, Dr. Pasupathy hopes to achieve a new level of understanding about how the non-human primate brain integrates visual information about form and surface properties. Shared stimuli and computational approaches will permit combining the groups' electrophysiological and computational investigations in primate visual cortex with data from Japanese collaborators who perform psychophysical studies in humans. These findings could bring researchers closer to devising strategies to alleviate and treat brain disorders of impaired form and texture processing resulting from dysfunctions in the occipito-temporal pathway.

Dendritic spines mediate essentially all excitatory connections and are thus critical elements in the brain, but their function is still poorly understood. In particular, a key question is whether or not they are electrical compartments. Dr. Rafael Yuste will explore the application of a broad theory to accurately model the constraints that the nanostructure of dendritic spines places on electrical current flow. Specifically, his team will combine modeling approaches to extract features from data, and experimental approaches to study how the geometry and composition of a dendritic spine affect the electrical and ionic fluxes and the coupling between the synapse and the dendrite. The work will help understand how synaptic voltages are shaped by dendritic spines, a phenomenon that is affected in many mental and neurological diseases.

The importance of auditory feedback in speaking is underscored by the many diseases with speech disorders whose etiology have been wholly or partially ascribed to underlying deficits in auditory feedback processing, including autism, stuttering, schizophrenia, dementia, and Parkinson's disease. Drs. Houde and Nagarajan propose to investigate a computational model of speech that assumes state-feedback control by the auditory system. This project could lead to better understanding of the role of auditory feedback, which may lead to improved diagnosis and treatment for these speech impairments.

The brain networks underlying visual attention remain poorly understood, in particular how populations of neurons communicate across regions to facilitate attention. Causal interventions, such as micro-stimulation, are a critically important way to test theories of communication between brain regions as well as to develop potential therapies. The overarching goal of Drs. Smith and Yu's project is to identify and optimize patterns of micro-stimulation in one brain region that influence another brain region, and in turn behavior. Their approach combines advanced physiological methods for simultaneous recording in multiple brain areas, a rigorous quantitative approach to understanding neuronal communication, and a novel optimization approach to using micro-stimulation to modulate neuronal activity and behavior. The implications of this work have extremely broad scope and may reveal fundamental principles by which inter-area communication supports myriad perceptual and cognitive abilities.

Tracking fast unpredictable movements is a valuable skill, applicable in many situations (e.g., chasing prey). The sensorimotor control system (SCS) is responsible for such actions and its performance depends on neurons, communication between brains and muscles, and muscle dynamics whose contributions have not been explicitly quantified. Dr. Sridevi Sarma and a team of investigators will build upon new theory developed using feedback control principles and an appropriately simplified model of the SCS to identify how neural computing, delays, and muscles interact during the generation of fast movements. In doing so, the group will seek to restore motor performance, and more importantly restore fast and agile movements, in patients with movement disorders via neuroprosthetic devices that are designed using a validated model of the sensorimotor control system and modern control theory.

Proprioception, or one’s relative sense of body position and strength during movement, is guided by muscle spindle sensory afferents. While altered muscle spindle function is implicated in a wide range of sensorimotor impairments and neurological disorders, the basic mechanisms of muscle spindle sensory encoding are not well understood. To address this issue, Dr. Ting will develop a novel, mechanistic model of muscle spindle sensory encoding to that will test hypotheses about the role of molecular, cellular, and circuit level mechanisms on sensorimotor control in healthy and impaired humans and animals. The model will be a useful platform to integrate classical and new findings of muscle spindle function spanning multiple levels. Importantly, the model will improve our basic understanding of how sensory impairments alter both sensing and moving, and to drive the development of new treatments.

Strategic planning is important for humans and other animals during learning and decision making. While mechanisms for reinforcement learning have been well studied, how the brain utilizes knowledge of the environment to plan sequential actions remains unexplored. To address this issue, Drs. Lee and Ma, PIs with complementary expertise will investigate how different subdivisions of the primate prefrontal cortex contribute to the evaluation and arbitration of different learning algorithms during strategic planning in primates. By taking advantage of recent advances in machine learning and decision neuroscience, the proposed studies will elucidate how multiple learning algorithms are simultaneously implemented and coordinated via specific patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex. The results from these studies will transform the behavioral and analytical paradigms used to study high-order planning and their neural underpinnings in humans and animals.

Understanding the molecular basis of memory storage through long-term potentiation (LTP) has major implications for memory disorders and stroke. Neural signals maintain and refresh LTP and require low levels of calcium, but whether achievement of this level is dependent on spontaneous neural activity is not known. To address this issue, Dr. Griffith will use acute hippocampal slices, behavioral observations in Drosophila, and computational modeling to test the role of spontaneous neural signals in memory refresh and maintenance. This project has the potential to bear importantly on the fundamental question of whether refresh reactions are mediated by spontaneous activity, providing important information towards understanding and treatment of memory disorders.

Real-time neural decoding predicts behavior based on neural data, provided it can do so at the same pace with which the behavior is being monitored. While miniature cellular imaging is fast becoming a powerful way to study neural circuits by recording activity with cellular spatial resolution and sub-second temporal resolution, it also generates massive amounts of high-dimensional spatiotemporal data, with which real-time neural decoding has yet to keep apace. Drs. Bhattacharyya and Chen propose to develop a software platform, called RNDC-Lab (Real-time Neural Decoding for Cellular imaging Laboratory), that will provide integrated capabilities for design of and experimentation with novel real-time neural decoding systems for miniature cellular imaging. RNDC-Lab will provide a framework and platform for cost-efficient, real-time signal processing, the success of this project carries therapeutic implications for improving precise neuromodulation systems.

Understanding the rhythm-generating mechanisms that give rise to locomotion are critical to inform therapeutic interventions following injury or motor disorders. Spinal circuitry orchestrating the rhythm and patterning of locomotion are located in the lumbar spinal cord. In a collaborative project, Dr. Dougherty will use state-of-art experimental studies of spinal neurons and neural circuits in combination with computational modeling to dissect the organization and operating mechanisms of the spinal locomotor central pattern generator. The identification of rhythm generating mechanisms and the organization of spinal flexor and extensor circuitries will provide essential insights that can be applied to treatments and recovery of function following spinal cord injury or other motor disorders involving abnormal spinal locomotor processing.

Animals learn about their environment through their sensory systems, and the mammalian olfactory system is ideal to understand the computations in brain areas that format this incoming information for easy and flexible extraction by downstream brain areas. Drs. Koulakov and Rinberg will utilize recently developed theoretical frameworks, new optical methods for stimulus control, and multi-neuron recordings, to carry out a collaborative project that tests the basic principles of sensory processing in the olfactory system. This project will help elucidate the general principles of olfactory information processing by demonstrating how sensory representations can be dynamically tuned to reflect particular tasks faced by the organism. Because about 1-2% of people in North America experience a smell disorder and loss in sense of smell can negatively affect quality of life, this work holds important implications for clinical and therapeutic interventions.

Dopamine neurons are implicated in a wide range of normal behavioral functions, as well as a wide range of neuropsychiatric diseases, including addiction. Dr. Witten's group will perform two-photon imaging in the midbrain of mice while they learn a complex decision-making task and incorporate a suite of statistical tools to address challenges in analyzing the activity and behavioral data. The identification of sub-populations of dopamine neurons with different functional properties could provide much-needed insight into how dopamine neurons contribute to the neurobiology of addiction.

Processing in cortical circuitry is critical to healthy development, underlies features of intelligence, and malfunctions during disease. Drs. Miller and Van Hooser will test the predictions of a powerful framework for understanding how the sensory cortex globally integrates multiple sources of input, bottom-up and top-down, to produce neuronal responses, and ultimately, perception. Combining a novel theory on neural responses, the stabilized supralinear network, with optical and genetic manipulations of visual cortical circuits in awake ferrets, the group will probe how the visual cortex responds to various natural stimuli. Understanding such global integration occurring in the cortex could lead to the improvement of prosthetic devices that interface with the brain to treat blindness and other disorders.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are increasingly used for control and communication, and for treatment of neurological disorders, yet despite their societal and clinical impact, many engineering challenges remain. In particular, voluntarily modulating brain activity to control a BCI requires several weeks or months to reach high performance, affecting the user’s daily life. To characterize the neural mechanisms of BCI learning and predict future performance, Dr. Danielle Bassett and a collaborative international team will leverage experimental data and interdisciplinary theoretical techniques. They will characterize brain networks at multiple scales, developing models to predict the ability to control the BCI, as well as methods to engineer BCI frameworks for adapting to neural plasticity. This project will enable a comprehensive understanding of the neural mechanisms of BCI learning, fostering the design of viable BCI frameworks that improve usability and performance.

Hemodynamic signals, such as those measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), are used to non-invasively image brain activity, but it is not known whether changes in blood flow are governed by average neural activity, or the activity of the most active neurons. Drs. Drew and Charpak, along with an international collaborative team, will use in vivo two-photon imaging, in close coordination with computational analysis methods, to investigate how neural activity is coupled to changes in blood flow. The combination of these two approaches will yield a quantitative understanding of how blood flow changes relate to neural activity, and a determination of the mechanisms underlying neurovascular coupling. A deeper understanding of the conversion of these hemodynamic signals into neural activity will inform the interpretation of human imaging studies, with clinical and therapeutic implications.

A fundamental gap remains in the understanding of how neural circuits represent complex objects like faces and permit facial recognition. The neural mechanisms of face processing are essential to human social life, and altered social perception is characteristic of many pervasive neurodevelopmental disorders. Dr. Freiwald plans to identify the neural mechanisms and computational principles underlying face recognition circuitry and explore how alterations to these circuits impair function. Integrating functional magnetic resonance imaging with electrophysiological recordings in the targeted brain regions of non-human primates, the group could uncover details of more general visual object recognition as well as advancing understanding of the circuit mechanisms for social perception.

One primary function of memory is to remember the past in order to anticipate and make decisions about the future. Neurophysiological findings show that the rodent hippocampus stores representations of past events, and that hippocampal theta oscillations may provide a mechanism to imagine future paths through space. Dr. Marc Howard and collaborators will use a combination of empirical work, advanced data analyses and computational modeling to develop a hypothesis for how the hippocampus and frontal cortex cooperate to navigate memory space and inform future behavior. By bridging levels of description from behavior, to an abstract mathematical framework, to systems neuroscience, this work may shed new light on fundamental mechanisms underlying memory in the hippocampus, paving the way towards treatment of memory dysfunction in a myriad of neurological disorders.

This project develops DABI (Data Archive for the Brain Initiative) to aid the dissemination of human neurophysiological data generated through the BRAIN Initiative. Incorporating infrastructure from a pre- existing hub for delivering effective informatics and analytics solutions for major projects in the study of neurological diseases, Drs. Toga, Duncan, and Pouratian will aggregate data related to human electrophysiology, making the data broadly available and accessible to the research community. The group plans to incorporate analysis tools with user interfaces, implement tools for data management and use, and link metadata across different data modalities. The overarching goal of this project is to secure, link, and disseminate BRAIN Initiative data with all pertinent recording and imaging parameters coming from participating sites

Many labs develop unique software to manage and interpret their findings, but those programs are often specific for certain types of datasets, making them difficult to share among researchers. Dr. Van Hooser’s team plans to create an interface standard that establishes a common set of processes for accessing neurophysiological and imaging data. The standard will be tested, and revised accordingly, based on feedback from graduate students and postdoctoral researchers during data access events, or “hack-a-thons.” The interface standard will help increase the speed of research and make data widely available, allowing individuals outside of the neuroscience and research communities to make discoveries.

The communications and interactions between neurons across the sensory-motor system require additional investigations with novel methodologies to understand dynamic activity patterns underlying behavior. Dr. Mishne will develop modular mathematical tools to automatically analyze massive amounts of high-resolution, spatiotemporal, neuronal activity data gathered from mice performing a reaching task. The proposed calcium imaging data will be processed in three modules that: develop methods for ROI (region of interest) extraction, use tensors and non-linear tools for multi-modal integration of neuronal activity with behavior, and predict future behavioral responses using a recurrent neural network approach. These methods for automated analysis, organization, and modeling of calcium imaging data gathered during behavioral tasks will be available for use by the entire community.

Dynamic neuronal activity patterns underlie behavioral and cognitive functions in healthy and disordered brains, but large-scale recordings of this activity produce massive amounts of data requiring complex computations. Dr. Engel’s project provides a novel theoretical framework for analytically modeling the process by which temporally diverse responses of single neurons contribute to population activity during decision making. The group will validate unbiased, computational methods to examine dynamic activity in primate and mouse cortices and incorporate this framework into their freely available “BrainFlow” software and visualization tools.

Agency, our ability to act and experience a sense of responsibility for our actions, is central to individual identity and societal conceptions of moral responsibility. Neural devices are currently used to treat some brain disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease, and are being developed to treat others such as depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, yet their use raises important ethical concerns about potential effects on agency. Dr. Goering, Dr. Klein and their team will investigate agency in individuals receiving brain computer interface devices for sensory, motor, communication, and psychiatric indications. They aim to build a user-centered neural agency framework, and, ultimately, to enhance the informed consent process by developing a communication tool that patient participants might use to better understand and discuss potential changes in agency associated with use of neural devices.

Molecular and cellular neuroscientists often lack the training in computer programming to fully explore “-omics” data common in the BRAIN Initiative. Drs. Hertzano and White will implement analytic software for visualization and interactive genome browsing of gene expression and RNA-seq data, including simple and complex cross-dataset analysis. These tools will be made available in the BRAIN Initiative funded Neuroscience Multi-Omic Data Archive (NeMO) which hosts multi-omic data. The software will provide an easy-to-use web-based work environment for visualization and analysis of multi-modality and multi- omic data, interrogation of relationships between epigenomic signatures and gene expression, and integration of analytical techniques for multivariate analysis, gene co- expression and other analyses.

More than 500,000 children in the US and Canada suffer from epilepsy and 30% of these children continue to experience seizures despite being treated with anti-seizure medication. Unmanaged, epilepsy can result in cognitive decline, social isolation, and poor quality of life, and has substantial economic impact on families and society. Novel approaches for treating epilepsy such as vagal nerve stimulation and responsive neurostimulation are being developed, but this work has been conducted predominately in adults and the outcomes of these trials are often not clearly generalizable to children. In this project, Drs. Illes and McDonald will explore ethical issues confronting families and clinicians when considering new treatment options for drug-resistant epilepsy in children. They aim to develop, evaluate, and deliver patient-directed resources in the form of infographics and informational materials and videos, and clinician resources for family decision-making, clinician counseling, and care.

Brain-computer interfaces and neuroprosthetics have provided a significant benefit to patients with cervical spinal cord injuries. However, current technology is limited in its abilities to allow the user to control how much force is exerted by the prosthesis and to provide sensory feedback from the prosthetic hand. In a public-private collaboration with Blackrock Microsystems, Dr. Boninger and colleagues are looking to improve the dexterity of neuroprostheses by incorporating microstimulation of the somatosensory cortex. This stimulation could provide tactile feedback to the user and hopefully allow the user to better control the force applied. Ultimately, this approach will improve the dexterity and control of prosthetic limbs used by patients with spinal cord injuries.

The NIH BRAIN Initiative aims to catalyze novel tools and technologies to modulate brain circuit function, paving the way for new treatment options for brain disorders. However, such interventions also have the potential to cause unintended changes in aspects of cognition, behavior, and emotion. These changes, in turn, raise concerns regarding autonomy, personal identity, and capacity for informed consent. In this study, Dr. Cabrera Trujillo and her team will study ethical concerns, beliefs, and attitudes about the use of novel bioelectric approaches among clinicians, patients, and the broader public. The work will provide stakeholder perspectives that will be valuable for informing the responsible development and use of these novel neurotechnologies.

Cross-frequency coupling (CFC) is a phenomenon through which brain rhythms of different frequencies (fast vs. slow oscillations) coordinate to enable efficient communication between and among neural networks. Current methods measure a single type of CFC related to a given research question, but do not necessarily account for different interactions or combinations between phase and amplitude in fast and slow frequency bands. Drs. Kramer and Eden will develop a more general statistical inferential framework to estimate CFC in rats by creating a method to acquire real-time phase and amplitude data for estimation of CFC to accommodate dynamic manipulations. The team will incorporate computational modeling studies to simulate CFC between the amygdala and the frontal cortex and test via in vivo experiments. This framework will allow future users to explore the basis of network communication in the brain and evaluate the causal role of cross-frequency coupling.

A central goal of the NIH BRAIN Initiative is to develop new and improved methods for modulating the activity of specific neural cells and circuits, including those of the spinal cord. Dr. Heckman and his team will study the effect of dorsal electrical stimulation (DES) on motor circuits of the lumbar spinal cord. Specifically, they will investigate how DES affects two functions of descending inputs from the brain to the spinal cord – the generation of movements and the control of spinal neuron excitability. This work will help define the potential of DES for selective control of spinal motor circuits and may inform efforts to restore movement after spinal cord injury via DES.

Three specific challenges for neuroscience data include: 1) identifying the relevant spatial, temporal, and computational scales in which the underlying information-processing dynamics are best understood, 2) identifying the best ways to design and select models to account for these dynamics, and 3) inferring what the data tells us about how the brain itself processes complex information. Drs. Gold and Balasubramanian will develop theoretical tools for understanding how the brain integrates information across large temporal and spatial scales, using definitions of complexity to facilitate the analysis and interpretation of complex neural and behavioral data sets. This formal, mathematical assessment of data complexity could be used by the community for other data-driven model building and for comparisons of existing neuroscience models.

Though calcium imaging permits single-cell observations in behaving animals, variation between trials and complexities in activity-dependent calcium dynamics and fluorescent read-out create challenging data analyses. Motivated by a large-scale, publicly-available repository of calcium imaging data obtained from mouse models at the Allen Brain Observatory, Drs. Witten and Buice will develop novel statistical models, methods, and software to improve analysis techniques comparing extracellular electrophysiology and calcium imaging recordings in the context of behavior. Creating new, open, online algorithms to interpret fluorescent traces of firing neurons and building models that account for variations in neuronal activity, could improve researchers’ ability to draw rigorous and replicable conclusions on the basis of calcium imaging data.

A thorough understanding of brain function requires the integration of neuroscience data across species and scales. While current software can verify data quality within one or a handful of data sources, reproducibility across multiple data sources is limited. Xenophon Papademetris and colleagues are developing software tools with cross-scale, cross-species reproducibility analysis in mind. By leveraging data created by two other BRAIN Initiative projects at Yale University, Papademetris will extend current software algorithms to incorporate data from multiple sources, design the software to be cross-platform compatible, validate the software through rigorous testing, and finally, distribute it to the community. The potential for a set of software tools to reliably and reproducibly analyze multiple heterogeneous neuroscience data types will help to break down data barriers for the greater neuroscience community.

Three separate research groups are collaborating to understand in detail how three distinct areas of the brain function and work together to enable learning and decision-making behaviors. Drs. Kreitzer, Komiyama, and Lim are leveraging an impressive set of technologies to monitor and perturb different cell types in each brain region while the mice perform learning and decision-making tasks. By applying multiple recording methods across these brain regions at both the level of a single neuron and entire subpopulations of neurons, while the animals perform the same set of tasks, researchers hope to develop a single model of how vertebrate animals make choices about what to do next.

Drs. Doiron, Smith, and Yu will develop a method that combines large-scale network modeling, large-scale neural recordings, and neural population analyses to understand the key network principles that drive behavior. The team proposes to validate their methods using data recorded from macaque prefrontal cortex to the visual area, V4. A toolkit called Balance BEAM (Brains, Experiments, Analysis and Models), implemented in Matlab, will include a graphical user interface for designing balanced, optimized network models. If successful, Balance BEAM will allow future users to better research how neural circuits give rise to transient activity, steady-state activity, and neural variability.

Understanding how neural signals from different parts of the brain impact each other over time could help reveal differences in information flow during typical and abnormal cortical states. Dr. Sejnowski proposes to develop a new algorithm for the causal analysis of time-series data called cross-dynamical Delay Differential Analysis (CD-DDA), for modeling time- series data. The work should extend CD-DDA to identify causally- connected brain network phenomena, using simulated Hodgkin-Huxley network models and electrocorticography recordings from epilepsy patients. Though this project uses electrocorticography data to validate CD- DDA, the tool can be applied to calcium recordings from single neurons, voltage sensitive dye recordings, local field potentials, EEG, MEG, and fMRI data. These analytical methods could help future users uncover the influence of information flow across cortical areas on activity of different neuronal populations.

It is currently not known how dynamic patterns of brain activity are transformed into cognition, emotion, perception and action in both health and disease in humans. Menon and his colleagues plan to develop novel algorithms for identifying dynamic functional networks in the brain and characterizing network interactions between brain regions involved in cognitive tasks, translating their studies from in vivo rodent data to humans. The researchers’ algorithms will facilitate rigorous investigations of brain dynamics that support critical cognitive functions and significantly advance the understanding of dynamic processes underlying human brain function and dysfunction. As an example, one of the major goals of the project will be using the newly created algorithms to investigate aberrant functional circuits associated with cognitive impairments in Parkinson’s disease.

Neurophysiology research, which focuses on recording brain cell activity, produces enormous amounts of complex data that are difficult to manage. Drs. Rubel and Ng will build upon the Neurodata Without Borders: Neurophysiology project to create a system that will allow for standardizing, sharing, and reusing neurophysiological data. The team will design an open source software system; develop methods to establish a consistent vocabulary for defining cell types, measurements, and behavioral tasks; and create tools to help the community adopt these new resources and standards. The proposed system will help accelerate neurophysiological discoveries as well as reproducibility studies.

To leverage the public investment in the BRAIN Initiative, the sharing of data produced by its myriad projects is paramount. Dr. Podrack’s project extends the recently released OpenNeuro, which was developed based on the well-established and successful OpenfMRI, for an archive of neuroimaging data. The extended archive encompasses a broader range of neuroimaging data including EEG, MEG, diffusion MRI and others. The archive also implements easy-to-use data submission, semi-automated curation and advanced data processing workflows, which run directly on the cloud platform. The archive allows to share the results alongside the data, federate with other relevant repositories, and accessible to all researchers.

Electrocorticography (ECOG) allows the direct recording of a small population of neurons in human subjects, generating vast amounts of data. Dr. Beauchamp plans to develop the software RAVE (R Analysis and Visualization of Electrocorticography data) to help researchers explore such datasets. Incorporating established and successful informatics approaches that enable standardization, sharing, and re-use of neurophysiology data and analyses, RAVE includes rigorous statistical methodologies and seamless integration with existing analysis platforms. To facilitate user adoption and maximize impact, the developers plan to release RAVE 1.0 to the entire ECOG community within 6 months of the project start.

High-throughput technologies help researchers understand how neural systems perform the computations that underlie perception, cognition, and behavior, but data obtained through simultaneous recordings from large groups of neurons and fine-grained behavioral tasks create a major bottleneck in data collection and analysis. Drs. Park and Pillow intend to develop statistical tools for tracking internal states of the brain that are not directly measurable from observation of behavior and neural signals. To uncover neuronal computations required for behavioral learning, the group will develop methods for tracking and enhancing the evolution of internal brain states during learning, generating optimal stimuli corresponding to those states to perturb or correct behavior. Subsequent evolution of this work could improve clinical tracking and intervention of neurological disorders with a behavioral component, like Parkinson’s disease. The effort will result in a real-time tool for tracking internal brain and behavioral states, applicable for both basic neuroscience research and clinical applications.

Studying how the brain works from the molecular to the circuit level is crucial for improving our understanding of how the brain functions normally, and what goes wrong in various disorders. Antibody probe techniques are effective tools that work at both of those levels. This project will develop a collection of validated, recombinant antibodies that are also highly renewable. In addition, antibodies will be miniaturized to increase binding efficiency and improve labeling precision. These resources will provide a cutting-edge, validated set of research tools to enable neuroscience research across a variety of resolutions from the intracellular to the neuronal network level.

Two-photon microscopy has emerged as a key technique for studying the activity of living neural networks. However, little optimization has been performed for the associated fluorescent activity probes and sensors. Dr. Drobizhev’s research group will create a resource at Montana State University to characterize the properties of two-photon probes and make that service available to the broader research community. Given increased used of this type of resource by BRAIN Initiative investigators, the research group will also organize meetings to help other labs develop their own characterization processes.

Neuroimaging techniques are advancing at a rapid rate, resulting in high resolution images of brain tissue and large datasets that can be difficult to manage. William Gray Roncal’s team propose an integration framework called SABER: Scalable Analytics for Brain Exploration Research. With a focus on techniques (e.g., electron microscopy) that produce high resolution brain images, SABER will create a unified framework by which these data types are accessible to a broader audience, can be processed in a reproducible, portable way, and can be scaled from small data volumes to large datasets. SABER has the potential to enable discoveries from high-resolution imaging techniques, making the parsing of entire brains a new reality.

The NIH BRAIN Initiative aims to facilitate development of new approaches for precisely measuring and modulating brain circuit function. The high tissue penetrability of ultrasound waves presents untapped opportunities for accessing neural circuits throughout the mammalian brain and offers the possibility of transforming our ability to map brain circuit activity, test new models of brain function, and ultimately, to diagnose and treat brain diseases and disorders. This project, led by Drs. Shoham, Froemke, and Kimmel, aims to elucidate the fundamental mechanisms of ultrasound stimulation, via mathematical analyses, computational modeling, and experimental validation in a mouse model. A thorough characterization of how ultrasound affects neural cells and circuits is an essential step forward in basic neuroscience research, and may enable further development of ultrasound as a tool for both neuroscientists and clinicians.

Organoids, grown in laboratory settings to resemble parts of the developing human brain, hold great potential for shedding light on human brain function and disease. Researchers are working to achieve key bioengineering advancements, including successful vascularization of brain organoids, generating the full complement of cell types present in a human brain, and recording and modulating neural activity in organoids. These anticipated advances in bioengineered human brain modeling research may raise ethical questions about the moral status of large, complex human brain organoids and ethical boundaries on manipulating increasingly realistic engineered brain models. In this project, Dr. Hyun will lead proactive ethical discussions among ethicists and the neuroscientists conducting this cutting-edge work to develop greater awareness and understanding of these ethical implications and to inform future management of ethical issues that may be unique to this novel area of brain research.

The possibility of harnessing ultrasound to modulate nerve function has interested scientists for many years. Though recent work has demonstrated the feasibility of using ultrasound to stimulate the central and peripheral nervous systems, it remains unclear whether ultrasound directly affects neuronal excitability or acts indirectly on the connections between neurons at the synaptic or circuit level. In this project, Drs. Cheng, Han and colleagues will explore these questions, using cutting-edge approaches to achieve high spatial resolution of stimulation, and high temporal resolution of recording the resultant neuronal effects. This work will inform future design of ultrasound neuro-stimulators for basic neuroscience research and possible novel therapies for neurological disorders.