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Section: New Software and Platforms
ENAS: Event Neural Assembly Simulation
Keywords: Neurosciences - Health - Physiology
Scientific Description
As one gains more intuitions and results on the importance of concerted activity in spike trains, models are developed to extract potential canonical principles underlying spike coding. These methods shed a new light on spike train dynamics. However, they require time and expertise to be implemented efficiently, making them hard to use in a daily basis by neuroscientists or modelers. To bridge this gap, we developed the license free multiplatform software ENAS (https://enas.inria.fr) integrating tools for individual and collective spike analysis and simulation, with some specificities devoted to the retina. The core of ENAS is the statistical analysis of population codes. One of its main strength is to provide statistical analysis of spike trains using Maximum Entropy-Gibbs distributions taking into account both spatial and temporal correlations as constraints, allowing to introduce causality and memory in statistics. It also generates simulated population raster from an user-specified Gibbs distribution.
We hope that ENAS will become a useful tool for neuroscientists to analyse spike trains and we hope to improve it thanks to user feedback. Our goal is to progressively enrich it with the latest research results, in order to facilitate transfer of new methods to the community.
Functional Description. ENAS is developed joinly by the Biovision, CORTEX/Mnemosyne, and DREAM Inria teams, under CeCILL-C licence, APP logiciel ENAS : IDDN.FR.OO1.190004.000.S.P.2014.000.31235. It can be freely loaded. ENAS has a friendly Graphical User Interface that avoids any scripting or writing code from user. Most methods have been implemented to run in parallel to reduce the time and memory consumption.