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Optimizing Measures of Information Encoding in Astrocytic Calcium Signals

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Brain Informatics (BI 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13406))

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Abstract

While most models of brain information encoding focus on neurons, recent studies have shown that calcium dynamics of astrocytes, the major class of non-neural cells in the brain, can add information about key cognitive variables that is not found in the activity of nearby neurons. This raises the question of what could be the contribution of astrocytes in information processing, and calls for analysis tools to characterize this contribution. Here we construct simulations with realistic dependencies of astrocytic activity on external variables and we use these simulations to understand how to optimally set parameters of information theoretic analysis of astrocytic activities. Applications of our techniques to simulated and real astrocytic data show how to set parameters of information analyses that provide conservative, yet reliable, estimates of astrocytic calcium dynamics contribution to circuit-level brain information processing.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Neural Computation Laboratory, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, 38068, Rovereto, Italy

    Jacopo Bonato & Stefano Panzeri

  2. Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology, University of Bologna, 40126, Bologna, Italy

    Jacopo Bonato

  3. Optical Approaches to Brain Function Laboratory, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, 16163, Genova, Italy

    Sebastiano Curreli & Tommaso Fellin

  4. Department of Excellence for Neural Information Processing, Center for Molecular Neurobiology (ZMNH), University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), 20251, Hamburg, Germany

    Stefano Panzeri

Authors
  1. Jacopo Bonato
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  2. Sebastiano Curreli
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  3. Tommaso Fellin
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  4. Stefano Panzeri
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jacopo Bonato .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

    Mufti Mahmud

  2. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Jing He

  3. University of Padua, Padua, Italy

    Stefano Vassanelli

  4. University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    André van Zundert

  5. Maebashi Institute of Technology, Maebashi, Japan

    Ning Zhong

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Bonato, J., Curreli, S., Fellin, T., Panzeri, S. (2022). Optimizing Measures of Information Encoding in Astrocytic Calcium Signals. In: Mahmud, M., He, J., Vassanelli, S., van Zundert, A., Zhong, N. (eds) Brain Informatics. BI 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13406. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15037-1_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15037-1_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-15036-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-15037-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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