🍩 Database of Original & Non-Theoretical Uses of Topology

(found 6 matches in 0.001205s)

  1. Barcodes Distinguish Morphology of Neuronal Tauopathy (2022)

    David Beers, Despoina Goniotaki, Diane P. Hanger, Alain Goriely, Heather A. Harrington
    Abstract The geometry of neurons is known to be important for their functions. Hence, neurons are often classified by their morphology. Two recent methods, persistent homology and the topological morphology descriptor, assign a morphology descriptor called a barcode to a neuron equipped with a given function, such as the Euclidean distance from the root of the neuron. These barcodes can be converted into matrices called persistence images, which can then be averaged across groups. We show that when the defining function is the path length from the root, both the topological morphology descriptor and persistent homology are equivalent. We further show that persistence images arising from the path length procedure provide an interpretable summary of neuronal morphology. We introduce \topological morphology functions\, a class of functions similar to Sholl functions, that can be recovered from the associated topological morphology descriptor. To demonstrate this topological approach, we compare healthy cortical and hippocampal mouse neurons to those affected by progressive tauopathy. We find a significant difference in the morphology of healthy neurons and those with a tauopathy at a postsymptomatic age. We use persistence images to conclude that the diseased group tends to have neurons with shorter branches as well as fewer branches far from the soma.

  3. The Importance of Forgetting: Limiting Memory Improves Recovery of Topological Characteristics From Neural Data (2018)

    Samir Chowdhury, Bowen Dai, Facundo Mémoli
    Abstract We develop of a line of work initiated by Curto and Itskov towards understanding the amount of information contained in the spike trains of hippocampal place cells via topology considerations. Previously, it was established that simply knowing which groups of place cells fire together in an animal’s hippocampus is sufficient to extract the global topology of the animal’s physical environment. We model a system where collections of place cells group and ungroup according to short-term plasticity rules. In particular, we obtain the surprising result that in experiments with spurious firing, the accuracy of the extracted topological information decreases with the persistence (beyond a certain regime) of the cell groups. This suggests that synaptic transience, or forgetting, is a mechanism by which the brain counteracts the effects of spurious place cell activity.

  4. Decoding of Neural Data Using Cohomological Feature Extraction (2019)

    Erik Rybakken, Nils Baas, Benjamin Dunn
    Abstract We introduce a novel data-driven approach to discover and decode features in the neural code coming from large population neural recordings with minimal assumptions, using cohomological feature extraction. We apply our approach to neural recordings of mice moving freely in a box, where we find a circular feature. We then observe that the decoded value corresponds well to the head direction of the mouse. Thus, we capture head direction cells and decode the head direction from the neural population activity without having to process the mouse's behavior. Interestingly, the decoded values convey more information about the neural activity than the tracked head direction does, with differences that have some spatial organization. Finally, we note that the residual population activity, after the head direction has been accounted for, retains some low-dimensional structure that is correlated with the speed of the mouse.

  5. Topological Analysis of Population Activity in Visual Cortex (2008)

    Gurjeet Singh, Facundo Memoli, Tigran Ishkhanov, Guillermo Sapiro, Gunnar Carlsson, Dario L. Ringach
    Abstract Information in the cortex is thought to be represented by the joint activity of neurons. Here we describe how fundamental questions about neural representation can be cast in terms of the topological structure of population activity. A new method, based on the concept of persistent homology, is introduced and applied to the study of population activity in primary visual cortex (V1). We found that the topological structure of activity patterns when the cortex is spontaneously active is similar to those evoked by natural image stimulation and consistent with the topology of a two sphere. We discuss how this structure could emerge from the functional organization of orientation and spatial frequency maps and their mutual relationship. Our findings extend prior results on the relationship between spontaneous and evoked activity in V1 and illustrates how computational topology can help tackle elementary questions about the representation of information in the nervous system.

  6. Uncovering the Topology of Time-Varying fMRI Data Using Cubical Persistence (2020)

    Bastian Rieck, Tristan Yates, Christian Bock, Karsten Borgwardt, Guy Wolf, Nicholas Turk-Browne, Smita Krishnaswamy
    Abstract Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a crucial technology for gaining insights into cognitive processes in humans. Data amassed from fMRI measurements result in volumetric data sets that vary over time. However, analysing such data presents a challenge due to the large degree of noise and person-to-person variation in how information is represented in the brain. To address this challenge, we present a novel topological approach that encodes each time point in an fMRI data set as a persistence diagram of topological features, i.e. high-dimensional voids present in the data. This representation naturally does not rely on voxel-by-voxel correspondence and is robust to noise. We show that these time-varying persistence diagrams can be clustered to find meaningful groupings between participants, and that they are also useful in studying within-subject brain state trajectories of subjects performing a particular task. Here, we apply both clustering and trajectory analysis techniques to a group of participants watching the movie 'Partly Cloudy'. We observe significant differences in both brain state trajectories and overall topological activity between adults and children watching the same movie.