Publications by authors named "Casey M Baker"

Recent advancements in two-photon calcium imaging have enabled scientists to record the activity of thousands of neurons with cellular resolution. This scope of data collection is crucial to understanding the next generation of neuroscience questions, but analyzing these large recordings requires automated methods for neuron segmentation. Supervised methods for neuron segmentation achieve state of-the-art accuracy and speed but currently require large amounts of manually generated ground truth training labels.

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Animals generate a wide range of highly coordinated motor outputs, which allows them to execute purposeful behaviors. Individual neurons in the circuits that generate behaviors have a remarkable capacity for flexibility as they exhibit multiple axonal projections, transmitter systems, and modes of neural activity. How these multi-functional properties of neurons enable the generation of adaptive behaviors remains unknown.

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Article Synopsis
  • Neural ensembles are crucial for cognitive functions like memory and perception, but better methods for activating them are needed for research.
  • Researchers developed a computational model to identify and analyze pattern completion neurons in the visual cortex using K-means clustering and a new metric called pattern completion capability (PCC).
  • Their findings indicate that by stimulating just a few neurons, researchers can reliably activate larger neural ensembles, aiding studies on how these networks function during behavior.
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Animals generate a wide range of highly coordinated motor outputs, which allows them to execute purposeful behaviors. Individual neuron classes in the circuits that generate behavior have a remarkable capacity for flexibility, as they exhibit multiple axonal projections, transmitter systems, and modes of neural activity. How these multi-functional properties of neurons enable the generation of highly coordinated behaviors remains unknown.

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To adapt to their environments, animals must generate behaviors that are closely aligned to a rapidly changing sensory world. However, behavioral states such as foraging or courtship typically persist over long time scales to ensure proper execution. It remains unclear how neural circuits generate persistent behavioral states while maintaining the flexibility to select among alternative states when the sensory context changes.

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