Part of the Progress in Neuroscience Seminar (PINS) series
Timothy H. Murphy Ph.D.
Professor
University of British Columbia
Abstract
The central focus of my lab is in understanding how cortical activity flow impacts normal brain function and diseases of the nervous system such as stroke. My laboratory contributes to understanding how a mouse cortex adapts after stroke, resulting in remapping of brain function from damaged to surviving areas using mouse models. The lab has developed new imaging and optogenetic tools that have parallels to human brain imaging and stimulation tools. We demonstrate that recovery after stroke employs circuits that are functionally related and structurally linked to those lost. Surprisingly, recovery not only involves functionally related circuits, but also network-wide changes in connection weights. To facilitate the study of stroke recovery we develop homecage brain-activity assessment tools for mice that are automatically followed in their own cages during short periods of restraint. Mouse head-fixed behavior coupled with functional imaging has become a powerful technique in rodent systems neuroscience. However, training mice can be time-consuming and is potentially stressful for animals. Here we report a fully automated, open-source, self-initiated head-fixation system for mesoscopic functional imaging in mice (Murphy et al. 2016 Nature Commun. and Elife 2020). The system supports 8 mice at a time and requires minimal investigator intervention. Using genetically encoded calcium indicator transgenic mice, we longitudinally monitor cortical functional connectivity up to 24 h per day. To accompany high-throughput assessment of brain activity, we develop a 3D synthetic animated mouse using animation and semi-random, joint-constrained movements to generate synthetic behavioral data for advanced model training. Image-domain translation produced realistic synthetic videos used to train 2D and 3D pose estimation that may facilitate automated etiological classification. We also integrate real-time behavioral assessment using markerless tracking of mouse body parts. The lab is currently integrating these tools to provide automated assessment of mouse stroke recovery within homecages.
Publications
Dial-In Information
Contact Sophy Aguilar: sot2002@med.cornell.edu for Zoom details
Thursday, October 28, 2021 at 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Virtual EventSophy Aguilar: sot2002@med.cornell.edu
Timothy Murphy
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