Section: Research Program

Main Objectives

The main challenge in computational neuroscience is the high complexity of neural systems. The brain is a complex system and exhibits a hierarchy of interacting subunits. On a specific hierarchical level, such subunits evolve on a certain temporal and spatial scale. The interactions of small units on a low hierarchical level build up larger units on a higher hierarchical level evolving on a slower time scale and larger spatial scale. By virtue of the different dynamics on each hierarchical level, until today the corresponding mathematical models and data analysis techniques on each level are still distinct. Only few analysis and modeling frameworks are known which link successfully at least two hierarchical levels.

Once having extracted models for different description levels, typically they are applied to obtain simulated activity which is supposed to reconstruct features in experimental data. Although this approach appears straight-forward, it implies various difficulties. Usually the models involve a large set of unknown parameters which determine the dynamical properties of the models. To optimally reconstruct experimental features, it is necessary to formulate an inverse problem to extract optimally such model parameters from the experimental data. Typically this is a rather difficult problem due to the low signal-to-noise ratio in experimental brain signals. Moreover, the identification of signal features to be reconstructed by the model is not obvious in most applications. Consequently an extended analysis of the experimental data is necessary to identify the interesting data features. It is important to combine such a data analysis step with the parameter extraction procedure to achieve optimal results. Such a procedure depends on the properties of the experimental data and hence has to be developed for each application separately. Machine learning approaches that attempt to mimic the brain and its cognitive processes had a lot of success in classification problems in a last decade. These hierarchical and iterative approaches use non-linear functions, which imitate neural cell responses, to communicate messages between neighboring layers. In our team, we work towards developing polysomnography-specific classifiers that might help in linking the features of particular interest for building systems for sleep signal classification with sleep mechanisms, with the accent on memory consolidation during the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep phase.