Renee Tung

Nov 20, 2023 | nature.com | Atika Syeda |Lin Zhong |Renee Tung |Marius Pachitariu

AbstractRecent studies in mice have shown that orofacial behaviors drive a large fraction of neural activity across the brain. To understand the nature and function of these signals, we need better computational models to characterize the behaviors and relate them to neural activity. Here we developed Facemap, a framework consisting of a keypoint tracker and a deep neural network encoder for predicting neural activity.

Nov 20, 2023 | janelia.org | Lin Zhong |Renee Tung |Will Long |Marius Pachitariu

Mice are always in motion. Even if there’s no external motivation for their actions—like a cat lurking a few feet away—mice are constantly sweeping their whiskers back and forth, sniffing around their environment and grooming themselves. These spontaneous actions light up neurons across many different regions of the brain, providing a neural representation of what the animal is doing moment-by-moment across the brain. But how the brain uses these persistent, widespread signals remains a mystery.