Multimodal, multi scale tools for neuroscience: a call to arms for physicists and engineers

by Dr Peter Ledochowitsch (Allen Institute for Brain Science)

Tuesday 26 Jul 2016, 12:00 → 13:00 US/Pacific

50 Auditorium

Half a century ago, Hubel and Wiesel, the Rock stars of visual neuroscience, were recording from single neurons. Today, we routinely record the activity of hundreds of cells; striving to resolve hundreds of thousands of tiny, individual, neural voices, in the near future. This ‘Moore’s law of neuroscience’ not only unlocks overwhelming opportunities for biologists and clinicians, it is also a rallying cry for physicists, engineers, and computer scientists. Modern neuroscience presents a plethora of technological challenges: it demands microscopes that see deeper into the living brain and collect more photons, faster, ideally without generating heat. It covets ever-tinier, ever-denser arrays of electrometers that can be placed into the living brain without damaging tissue, and then last there forever, needing ever-less power, and, ideally, no wires. It yearns for algorithms and computing infrastructure that allow complex analyses of TBs of data performed ‘in real time’. And yet, any one sensing modality, be it using photons, ions, sound waves, or something much more exotic, throws but a shadow of the ‘true’ state of information contained in any ‘neural device under test’. The first half of this talk will focus on the development of a novel neural interface: a high-resolution, ultra-flexible, (optionally) fully transparent micro-electrocorticographic grid (μECoG) for subdural recordings, which was developed, fabricated, and tested at the UC Berkeley & UCSF Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses (CNEP), and later commercialized by Cortera Neurotechnologies, Inc. The second half of my talk will touch on more recent work conducted in the Research Engineering Group a the Allen Institute for Brain Science: on the development of next generation ~1000 channel neural probes, on our work on optical recording and stimulation of neural activity with single-cell precision using multi-photon digital holography, and on the multi-modal integration of these two, which forms the core of my current research endeavors.