Decoding Neuronal Ensembles from Spatially-Referenced Calcium Traces: A Bayesian Semiparametric Approach

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Hauptverfasser: D'Angelo, Laura, Denti, Francesco, Canale, Antonio, Guindani, Michele
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author D'Angelo, Laura
Denti, Francesco
Canale, Antonio
Guindani, Michele
author_facet D'Angelo, Laura
Denti, Francesco
Canale, Antonio
Guindani, Michele
contents Understanding how neurons coordinate their activity is a fundamental question in neuroscience, with implications for learning, memory, and neurological disorders. Calcium imaging has emerged as a powerful method to observe large-scale neuronal activity in freely moving animals, providing time-resolved recordings of hundreds of neurons. However, fluorescence signals are noisy and only indirectly reflect underlying spikes of neuronal activity, complicating the extraction of reliable patterns of neuronal coordination. We introduce a fully Bayesian, semiparametric model that jointly infers spiking activity and identifies functionally coherent neuronal ensembles from calcium traces. Our approach models each neuron's spiking probability through a latent Gaussian process and encourages anatomically coherent clustering using a location-dependent stick-breaking prior. A spike-and-slab Dirichlet process captures heterogeneity in spike amplitudes while filtering out negligible events. We consider calcium imaging data from the hippocampal CA1 region of a mouse as it navigates a circular arena, a setting critical for understanding spatial memory and neuronal representation of environments. Our model uncovers spatially structured co-activation patterns among neurons and can be employed to reveal how ensemble structures vary with the animal's position.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_09576
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Decoding Neuronal Ensembles from Spatially-Referenced Calcium Traces: A Bayesian Semiparametric Approach
D'Angelo, Laura
Denti, Francesco
Canale, Antonio
Guindani, Michele
Methodology
Understanding how neurons coordinate their activity is a fundamental question in neuroscience, with implications for learning, memory, and neurological disorders. Calcium imaging has emerged as a powerful method to observe large-scale neuronal activity in freely moving animals, providing time-resolved recordings of hundreds of neurons. However, fluorescence signals are noisy and only indirectly reflect underlying spikes of neuronal activity, complicating the extraction of reliable patterns of neuronal coordination. We introduce a fully Bayesian, semiparametric model that jointly infers spiking activity and identifies functionally coherent neuronal ensembles from calcium traces. Our approach models each neuron's spiking probability through a latent Gaussian process and encourages anatomically coherent clustering using a location-dependent stick-breaking prior. A spike-and-slab Dirichlet process captures heterogeneity in spike amplitudes while filtering out negligible events. We consider calcium imaging data from the hippocampal CA1 region of a mouse as it navigates a circular arena, a setting critical for understanding spatial memory and neuronal representation of environments. Our model uncovers spatially structured co-activation patterns among neurons and can be employed to reveal how ensemble structures vary with the animal's position.
title Decoding Neuronal Ensembles from Spatially-Referenced Calcium Traces: A Bayesian Semiparametric Approach
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09576