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wholeBrain imaging paper
The goal of this work is to provide a broad description of the population activity patterns that occur in developing cerebral cortex.
The main manuscript file is wholeBrain_main.md
Rationale
The idea is to provide a clear and beautiful representation of the visualized activity patterns in the developing brain.
Scientific importance
A comprehensive description of the spatiotemporal activity patterns in the immature brain will be crucial to understanding the developmental dynamics that exist between intrinsic and extrinsic factors that regulate circuit development.
- signature patterns that predict current or future behavior
- construction of self-organizing circuits (advanced robotics -- Terminator, Skynet, Cylons)
Human health importance
- neurodevelopmental disorders (autism, schizophrenia, epilepsy)
- activity-dependent structural plasticity. Implications for brain repair.
- development of brain-machine interfaces
Future work
More detailed descriptions of the nature and the functions of these activity patterns can and should be performed in parallel in ongoing and future studies.
For example:
- What is the intra- vs sub- cortical nature of barrel cortex activity (E.M.'s work)
- What is the intra- vs sub- cortical nature of ongoing activity in motor- associational-, and other non-primary sensory cortical areas?
- Relationship of imaged patterns to EEG patterns described in other studies?
- Extent to which functional correlations reflect direct synaptic connections?
- Retinal wave drive of other areas?
- Ontogenetic relationships of localized calcium domains?
- Development profile through first postnatal weeks
- Chronic developmental profile in individuals?
- Aberrant activity patterns in developmental disorder and seizure models?
Workflow
Writing workflow will be similar to that used previously for current opinion review. Some useful info in currOpinRvw outline.
Instructions for converting multimarkdown to Word document
Image processing and dataset generation will utilize custom code in the wholeBrainDX software project.
Datasets, and exploratory data analysis will use R code that lives inside this wholeBrain project repository. Datasets and raw data to big too be inside this git repo will be stored on external servers and linked to accordingly.