🍩 Database of Original & Non-Theoretical Uses of Topology

(found 3 matches in 0.002931s)
  1. Toroidal Topology of Population Activity in Grid Cells (2022)

    Richard J. Gardner, Erik Hermansen, Marius Pachitariu, Yoram Burak, Nils A. Baas, Benjamin A. Dunn, May-Britt Moser, Edvard I. Moser
    Abstract The medial entorhinal cortex is part of a neural system for mapping the position of an individual within a physical environment1. Grid cells, a key component of this system, fire in a characteristic hexagonal pattern of locations2, and are organized in modules3 that collectively form a population code for the animal’s allocentric position1. The invariance of the correlation structure of this population code across environments4,5 and behavioural states6,7, independent of specific sensory inputs, has pointed to intrinsic, recurrently connected continuous attractor networks (CANs) as a possible substrate of the grid pattern1,8–11. However, whether grid cell networks show continuous attractor dynamics, and how they interface with inputs from the environment, has remained unclear owing to the small samples of cells obtained so far. Here, using simultaneous recordings from many hundreds of grid cells and subsequent topological data analysis, we show that the joint activity of grid cells from an individual module resides on a toroidal manifold, as expected in a two-dimensional CAN. Positions on the torus correspond to positions of the moving animal in the environment. Individual cells are preferentially active at singular positions on the torus. Their positions are maintained between environments and from wakefulness to sleep, as predicted by CAN models for grid cells but not by alternative feedforward models12. This demonstration of network dynamics on a toroidal manifold provides a population-level visualization of CAN dynamics in grid cells.
  2. Using Persistent Homology to Reveal Hidden Information in Neural Data (2015)

    Gard Spreemann, Benjamin Dunn, Magnus Bakke Botnan, Nils A. Baas
    Abstract We propose a method, based on persistent homology, to uncover topological properties of a priori unknown covariates of neuron activity. Our input data consist of spike train measurements of a set of neurons of interest, a candidate list of the known stimuli that govern neuron activity, and the corresponding state of the animal throughout the experiment performed. Using a generalized linear model for neuron activity and simple assumptions on the effects of the external stimuli, we infer away any contribution to the observed spike trains by the candidate stimuli. Persistent homology then reveals useful information about any further, unknown, covariates.
  3. Topological Analysis of Gene Expression Arrays Identifies High Risk Molecular Subtypes in Breast Cancer (2012)

    Javier Arsuaga, Nils A. Baas, Daniel DeWoskin, Hideaki Mizuno, Aleksandr Pankov, Catherine Park
    Abstract Genomic technologies measure thousands of molecular signals with the goal of understanding complex biological processes. In cancer these molecular signals have been used to characterize disease subtypes, signaling pathways and to identify subsets of patients with specific prognosis. However molecular signals for any disease type are so vast and complex that novel mathematical approaches are required for further analyses. Persistent and computational homology provide a new method for these analyses. In our previous work we presented a new homology-based supervised classification method to identify copy number aberrations from comparative genomic hybridization arrays. In this work we first propose a theoretical framework for our classification method and second we extend our analysis to gene expression data. We analyze a published breast cancer data set and find that that our method can distinguish most, but not all, different breast cancer subtypes. This result suggests that specific relationships between genes, captured by our algorithm, help distinguish between breast cancer subtypes. We propose that topological methods can be used for the classification and clustering of gene expression profiles.