Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Current neuroscience research is often limited to testing predetermined hypotheses and post hoc analysis of already collected data. Adaptive experimental designs, in which modeling drives ongoing data collection and selects experimental manipulations, offer a promising alternative. Still, tight integration between models and data collection requires coordinating diverse hardware configurations and complex computations under real-time constraints. Here, we introduce improv , a software platform that allows users to fully integrate custom modeling, analysis, and visualization with data collection and experimental control. We demonstrate both in silico and in vivo how improv enables more efficient experimental designs for discovery and validation across various model organisms and data types. Improv can orchestrate custom real-time behavioral analyses, rapid functional typing of neural responses from large populations via calcium microscopy, and optimal visual stimulus selection. We incorporate real-time machine learning methods for dimension reduction and predictive modeling of latent neural and behavioral features. Finally, we demonstrate how improv can perform model-driven interactive imaging and simultaneous optogenetic photostimulation of visually responsive neurons in the larval zebrafish brain expressing GCaMP6s and the red-shifted opsin rsChRmine. Together, these results demonstrate the power of improv to integrate modeling with data collection and experimental control to achieve next-generation adaptive experiments.
Source: Nature Communications
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $6,990
Funders: Howard Hughes Medical Institute, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, Whitehall Foundation, Ruth K. Broad Biomedical Research Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Eye Institute, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
Awards: G1381129419, G1509925647, G1971035931, Real-time, all-optical interrogation of neural microcircuitry in the pretectum, G2497055673, G2728786780, Functional connectivity of a brain-scale neural circuit for motion perception, Real-time mapping and adaptive testing for neural population hypotheses, Development of brain-scale neural circuits underlying vertebrate visuomotor transformations, Functional connectivity of a brain-scale neural circuit for motion perception
OpenAlex ID: W4416124700