Decoding Neural Responses in Mouse Visual Cortex through a Deep Neural Network

TL;DR

This paper uses deep neural networks to decode neural responses in the mouse visual cortex, revealing how neurons encode natural and artificial stimuli and demonstrating cross-animal generalization of neural coding.

Contribution

It introduces a DNN-based approach to decode neural responses from mouse visual cortex and explores neural encoding of different stimuli across animals.

Findings

DNN achieves up to 100% decoding accuracy within a single animal.

Decoding accuracy across animals is 91%.

Neural encoding of stimuli is consistent across individual mice.

Abstract

Finding a code to unravel the population of neural responses that leads to a distinct animal behavior has been a long-standing question in the field of neuroscience. With the recent advances in machine learning, it is shown that the hierarchically Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) perform optimally in decoding unique features out of complex datasets. In this study, we utilize the power of a DNN to explore the computational principles in the mammalian brain by exploiting the Neuropixel data from Allen Brain Institute. We decode the neural responses from mouse visual cortex to predict the presented stimuli to the animal for natural (bear, trees, cheetah, etc.) and artificial (drifted gratings, orientated bars, etc.) classes. Our results indicate that neurons in mouse visual cortex encode the features of natural and artificial objects in a distinct manner, and such neural code is consistent across animals. We investigate this by applying transfer learning to train a DNN on the neural responses of a single animal and test its generalized performance across multiple animals. Within a single animal, DNN is able to decode the neural responses with as much as 100% classification accuracy. Across animals, this accuracy is reduced to 91%. This study demonstrates the potential of utilizing the DNN models as a computational framework to understand the neural coding principles in the mammalian brain.