This course, arranged by EPFL and also available as a MOOC on edX, aims for a mechanistic description of mammalian brain function at the level of individual nerve cells and their synaptic interactions.
This course tackles the issue of maintaining ethical research and healthcare practices in the age of increasingly powerful technological tools like machine learning and artificial intelligence. While there is great potential for innovation and improvement in the clinical space thanks to AI development, lecturers in this course advocate for a greater emphasis on human-centric care, calling for algorithm design which takes the full intersectionality of individuals into account.
This course consists of three lessons, each corresponding to a lightning talk given at the first day of INCF's Neuroinformatics Assembly 2023. By following along these brief talks, you will hear about topics such as open source tools for computer vision, tools for the integration of various MRI dataset formats, as well as international data governance.
This course outlines how versioning code, data, and analysis software is crucially important to rigorous and open neuroscience workflows that maximize reproducibility and minimize errors.Version control systems, code-capable notebooks, and virtualization containers such as Git, Jupyter, and Docker, respectively, have become essential tools in data science.
Sessions from the INCF Neuroinformatics Assembly 2022 day 1.
Presented by the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF), this series consists of several lectures characterizing cutting-edge, open-source software platforms and computational tools for neuroscientists. This course offers detailed descriptions of various neuroinformatic resources such as cloud-computing services, web-based annotation tools, genome browsers, and platforms for designing and building biophysically detailed models of neurons and neural ensembles.
This module introduces computational neuroscience by simulating neurons according to the AdEx model. You will learn about generative modeling, dynamical systems, and F-I curves. The MATLAB code introduces live scripts and functions.
The Neurodata Without Borders: Neurophysiology project (NWB, https://www.nwb.org/) is an effort to standardize the description and storage of neurophysiology data and metadata. NWB enables data sharing and reuse and reduces the energy-barrier to applying data analytics both within and across labs. Several laboratories, including the Allen Institute for Brain Science, have wholeheartedly adopted NWB.
The dimensionality and size of datasets in many fields of neuroscience research require massively parallel computing power. Fortunately, the maturity and accessibility of virtualization technologies has made it feasible to run the same analysis environments on platforms ranging from single laptop computers up to high-performance computing networks.
Most who enter the field of computational neuroscience have a prior background in either mathematics, physics, computer science, or (neuro)biology. Since computational neuroscience requires a bit of knowledge from all these fields, with some basic knowledge of neurons and a familiarity with certain types of equations and mathematical concepts, we recommend two different "starting tracks" depending on the student's background before you begin the lectures listed below:
Given the extreme interconnectedness of the human brain, studying any one cerebral area in isolation may lead to spurious results or incomplete, if not problematic, interpretations. This course introduces participants to the various spatial scales of neuroscience and the fundamentals of whole-brain modelling, used to generate a more thorough picture of brain activity.
Neuromatch Academy aims to introduce traditional and emerging tools of computational neuroscience to trainees.
Sessions from the INCF Neuroinformatics Assembly 2022 day 2.
The human mind is a complex system that produces, processes, and transmits information in an incomparable manner. Human thoughts and actions depend profoundly on the proper function of neurons. If this function is disrupted, degeneration and disease can be the consequence. This course provides insights into state-of-the-art views on neurodegenerative, neuropsychiatric, and neuroimmunological disorders as well as clinical neuroanatomy and clinical aspects of brain imaging.
This course consists of introductory lectures on different aspects of biochemical models. By following this course, you will learn about the various forms plasticity can take at different levels in the brain, how to model chemical computation in the brain, as well as computationally demanding studies of synaptic plasticity on the molecular level.
These courses give introductions and overviews of some of the major statistics software packages currently used in neuroscience research.
The goal of this module is to work with action potential data taken from a publicly available database. You will learn about spike counts, orientation tuning, and spatial maps. The MATLAB code introduces data types, for-loops and vectorizations, indexing, and data visualization.
This course contains sessions from the first day of INCF's Neuroinformatics Assembly 2022.
The International Brain Initiative (IBI) is a consortium of the world’s major large-scale brain initiatives and other organizations with a vested interest in catalyzing and advancing neuroscience research through international collaboration and knowledge sharing. This session will introduce the IBI and the current efforts of the Data Standards and Sharing Working Group with a view to gain input from a wider neuroscience and neuroinformatics community.
In this course, you will learn about working with calcium-imaging data, including image processing to remove background "blur", identifying cells based on threshold spatial contiguity, time-series filtering, and principal component analysis (PCA). The MATLAB code shows data animations, capabilities of the image processing toolbox, and PCA.