The spectro-temporal receptive field (STRF) is a model representation of the excitatory and inhibitory integration area of auditory neurons. Recently it has been used to study spectral and temporal aspects of monaural integration in auditory centers. Here we report the properties of monaural STRFs and the relationship between ipsi- and contralateral inputs to neurons of the central nucleus of cat inferior colliculus (ICC) of cats. First, we use an optimal singular-value decomposition method to approximate auditory STRFs as a sum of time-frequency separable Gabor functions. This procedure extracts nine physiologically meaningful parameters. The STRFs of approximately 60% of collicular neurons are well described by a time-frequency separable Gabor STRF model, whereas the remaining neurons exhibited obliquely oriented or multiple excitatory/inhibitory subfields that require a nonseparable Gabor fitting procedure. Parametric analysis reveals distinct spectro-temporal tradeoffs in receptive field size and modulation filtering resolution. Comparisons between an identical model used to study spatio-temporal integration areas of visual neurons further shows that auditory and visual STRFs share numerous structural properties. We then use the Gabor STRF model to compare quantitatively receptive field properties of contra- and ipsilateral inputs to the ICC. We show that most interaural STRF parameters are highly correlated bilaterally. However, the spectral and temporal phases of ipsi- and contralateral STRFs often differ significantly. This suggests that activity originating from each ear share various spectro-temporal response properties such as their temporal delay, bandwidth, and center frequency but have shifted or interleaved patterns of excitation and inhibition. These differences in converging monaural receptive fields expand binaural processing capacity beyond interaural time and intensity aspects and may enable colliculus neurons to detect disparities in the spectro-temporal composition of the binaural input.

Brain extraction is an important preprocessing step for further processing (e.g., registration and morphometric analysis) of brain MRI data. Due to the operator-dependent and time-consuming nature of manual extraction, automated or semi-automated methods are essential for large-scale studies. Automatic methods are widely available for human brain imaging, but they are not optimized for rodent brains and hence may not perform well. To date, little work has been done on rodent brain extraction. We present an extended pulse-coupled neural network algorithm that operates in 3-D on the entire image volume. We evaluated its performance under varying SNR and resolution and tested this method against the brain-surface extractor (BSE) and a level-set algorithm proposed for mouse brain. The results show that this method outperforms existing methods and is robust under low SNR and with partial volume effects at lower resolutions. Together with the advantage of minimal user intervention, this method will facilitate automatic processing of large-scale rodent brain studies.

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The past decades witnessed a surge of interest in neuroimaging study of normal and abnormal early brain development. Structural and functional studies of normal early brain development revealed massive structural maturation as well as sequential, coordinated, and hierarchical emergence of functional networks during the infancy period, providing a great foundation for the investigation of abnormal early brain development mechanisms. Indeed, studies of altered brain development associated with either genetic or environmental risks emerged and thrived. In this paper, we will review selected studies of genetic and environmental risks that have been relatively more extensively investigated-familial risks, candidate risk genes, and genome-wide association studies (GWAS) on the genetic side; maternal mood disorders and prenatal drug exposures on the environmental side. Emerging studies on environment-gene interactions will also be reviewed. Our goal was not to perform an exhaustive review of all studies in the field but to leverage some representative ones to summarize the current state, point out potential limitations, and elicit discussions on important future directions.