Tin, C. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2025

Cerebellum-Targeted Transcranial Focused Ultrasound Stimulation Modulates Hippocampus Neural Activities

Low-intensity transcranial focused ultrasound stimulation (tFUS) has recently emerged as a promising neuromodulation technique due to its non-invasive nature, ability to penetrate deeply, and high spatial resolution. On the other hand, the cerebellum has attracted new interest as a target for neuromodulation. In this study, we investigated how cerebellum-targeted tFUS could modulate hippocampal neural activity. We found that tFUS at pulse repetition frequency (PRF) as high as 10kHz can effectively activate the cerebellum in vivo. Furthermore, PRF at 10kHz, rather than 1kHz, favored remote inhibition of hippocampus neurons. We found that the neuromodulation at hippocampus was mainly mediated by cerebellum cortex than deep cerebellar nucleus. Furthermore, by cFos expression mapping and phase-amplitude coupling analysis, we showed that the hippocampal response at different PRFs resulted from altered neurodynamic interaction rather than overall activation of engaged brain regions. Our results reveal new potential for cerebellum as a neuromodulation target for hippocampus-related functions.

bioengineering↗

bioRxiv2021

Effective and Efficient Neural Networks for Spike Inference from In Vivo Calcium Imaging

Calcium imaging technique provides the advantages in monitoring large population of neuronal activities simultaneously. However, it lacks the signal quality provided by neural spike recording in traditional electrophysiology. To address this issue, we developed a supervised data-driven approach to extract spike information from calcium signals. We propose the ENS2 (effective and efficient neural networks for spike inference from calcium signals) system for spike-rate and spike-event predictions using raw calcium inputs based on U-Net deep neural network. When testing on a large, ground truth public database, it consistently outperformed state-of-the-arts algorithms in both spike-rate and spike-event predictions with reduced computational load. We further demonstrated that ENS2 can be applied to analyses of orientation selectivity in primary visual cortex neurons. We concluded that it would be a versatile inference system that benefits diverse neuroscience studies.

neuroscience↗