Scalable inference for neuronal connectivity from calcium imaging

Alyson K. Fletcher, Sundeep Rangan

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Fluorescent calcium imaging provides a potentially powerful tool for inferring connectivity in neural circuits with up to thousands of neurons. However, a key challenge in using calcium imaging for connectivity detection is that current systems often have a temporal response and frame rate that can be orders of magnitude slower than the underlying neural spiking process. Bayesian inference methods based on expectation-maximization (EM) have been proposed to overcome these limitations, but are often computationally demanding since the E-step in the EM procedure typically involves state estimation for a high-dimensional nonlinear dynamical system. In this work, we propose a computationally fast method for the state estimation based on a hybrid of loopy belief propagation and approximate message passing (AMP). The key insight is that a neural system as viewed through calcium imaging can be factorized into simple scalar dynamical systems for each neuron with linear interconnections between the neurons. Using the structure, the updates in the proposed hybrid AMP methodology can be computed by a set of one-dimensional state estimation procedures and linear transforms with the connectivity matrix. This yields a computationally scalable method for inferring connectivity of large neural circuits. Simulations of the method on realistic neural networks demonstrate good accuracy with computation times that are potentially significantly faster than current approaches based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems
PublisherNeural information processing systems foundation
Pages2843-2851
Number of pages9
Volume4
EditionJanuary
StatePublished - 2014
Event28th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2014, NIPS 2014 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: Dec 8 2014Dec 13 2014

Other

Other28th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2014, NIPS 2014
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityMontreal
Period12/8/1412/13/14

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Signal Processing

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