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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. ENAS also generates simulated spike trains. On one hand, one can draw a population raster from an user-specified Gibbs distribution. On the other hand, we have integrated in ENAS our retina simulator VIRTUAL RETINA, extended here to include lateral connections in the IPL. 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: 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 integrating tools for spike trains analysis and simulation. These tools are accessible through a friendly Graphical User Interface that avoids any scripting or writing code from the user. Most of them have been implemented to run in parallel to reduce the time and memory consumption. ENAS offers basic visualizations and classical analysis for statistics of spike trains analysis. It also proposes statistical analysis with Maximum Entropy-Gibbs distributions taking into account both spatial and temporal correlations as constraints, allowing to introduce causality and memory in statistics. ENAS also includes specific tools dedicated to the retina: Receptive Field computation and a virtual retina simulator. Finally, ENAS generates synthetic rasters, either from know statistics or from the VIRTUAL RETINA simulator. We expect ENAS to become a useful tool for neuroscientists to analyse spike trains and we hope to improve it thanks to users feedback. From our perspective, our goal is to progressively enrich ENAS with the latest research results, in order to facilitate transfer of new methods to the community.