Decoding Cortical Brain States from Widefield Calcium Imaging Data Using Visibility Graph

Widefield optical imaging of neuronal populations over large portions of the cerebral cortex in awake behaving animals, provides a unique opportunity for investigating the relationship between brain function and behavior. In this paper,we demonstrate that the temporal characteristics of calcium dynamics obtained through widefield imaging can be utilized to infer the corresponding behavior. Cortical activity in six new generation transgenic calcium reporter mice expressing GCaMP6f in neocortical pyramidal neurons, are recorded during active whisking (AW) and no whisking (NW). To extract features related to temporal characteristics of calcium recordings, a method based on visibility graph (VG) is introduced. An extensive study considering different choice of features and classifiers is conducted to find the best model capable of predicting AW and NW from calcium recordings. Our experimental results show that temporal characteristics of calcium recordings identified by the proposed method, carry discriminatory information that are powerful enough for decoding behavior.