The State of the NIH BRAIN Initiative

Abstract

The BRAIN Initiative arose from a grand challenge to "accelerate the development and application of new technologies that will enable researchers to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show how individual brain cells and complex neural circuits interact at the speed of thought." The BRAIN Initiative is a public-private effort focused on the development and use of powerful tools for acquiring fundamental insights about how information processing occurs in the central nervous system (CNS). As the Initiative enters its fifth year, NIH has supported >500 principal investigators, who have answered the Initiative's challenge via hundreds of publications describing novel tools, methods, and discoveries that address the Initiative's seven scientific priorities. We describe scientific advances produced by individual laboratories, multi-investigator teams, and entire consortia that, over the coming decades, will produce more comprehensive and dynamic maps of the brain, deepen our understanding of how circuit activity can produce a rich tapestry of behaviors, and lay the foundation for understanding how its circuitry is disrupted in brain disorders. Much more work remains to bring this vision to fruition, and the National Institutes of Health continues to look to the diverse scientific community, from mathematics, to physics, chemistry, engineering, neuroethics, and neuroscience, to ensure that the greatest scientific benefit arises from this unique research Initiative.

On the inference speed and video-compression robustness of DeepLabCut

“…Neuroscience has arrived in the era of big data [7][8][9]18]. Being able to analyze and store data efficiently will be critical as datasets become larger and analyses become more complex.…”

In VitroTesting of Voltage Indicators: Archon1, ArcLightD, ASAP1, ASAP2s, ASAP3b, Bongwoori-Pos6, BeRST1, FlicR1, and Chi-VSFP-Butterfly

“…Systems neuroscientists are already overwhelmed with the complexity of their experiments (involving awake behaving animals and complex stimulation paradigms) to also worry about not getting any optical signals in GEVI imaging applications. Recently, we witnessed a sudden surge in the amount of research effort invested toward improving GEVI indicator properties and GEVI imaging equipment, mostly funded by the NIH Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative (Koroshetz et al, 2018). The latest improvements in the GEVI imaging field are quite impressive (Kannan et al, 2018;Abdelfattah et al, 2019;Adam et al, 2019;Piatkevich et al, 2019;Villette et al, 2019).…”

Why not record from every electrode with a CMOS scanning probe?

“…The CMOS technology makes future devices, which distribute dense electrode groups throughout the brain possible. Our results indicate that their exploration can greatly benefit neuroscientific research, that being also one of the major aims of large neuroscience projects like the NIH Brain Initiative (Koroshetz et al, 2018).…”