This post has a protocol for putting DeepLabCut into GPU server production on github. 1. Using DeepLabCut to perform markless body tracking in mice DeepLabCut is an open source machine vision package developed in Professor Mackenzie Mathis’s lab at EPFL and Harvard to harness two elements of machine vision into one tool. Firstly, they use convolutional neural networks (CNNS) to…
During my thesis I built a 1D virtual track that responded to mouse locomotion in order to naturalistically deliver tactile shapes and textures in a controlled environment: The heart of this technical challenge was building the right running disk. In this post we will discuss how to make a low-weight running disk with high-speed, high-resolution positional readout. Along the way…
Introduction: the .mvw mystery A month or two ago, I overheard my boss talking with a coworker about reviews from a recent paper submission. The reviewer brought up an important confound that could offer a trivial explanation for one of the results in the paper. The only way to address the problem was to review videos from the experiments to…
Introduction Tubing up the solenoid Solenoid driver circuitry Calibrating volume delivery Arduino code example 1. Introduction In a previous post, I described how to build an infrared lickometer (lick detector), but have yet to describe how to calibrate and deliver water from such a device. (Shout out to Allan-Herman Pool at Caltech for the encouragement to finish the story here!). Edit:…
As neurophysiologists, we require the use of some rather sophisticated electronic equipment to amplify and measure neural signals in the brain. Complex systems have been developed to efficiently record 10s to 100s of channels of neural data from increasingly small sensors implanted in the brain. That being said, sometimes the equipment is complicated… for basically no reason. At best, we might chalk this…
Introduction Building the lickometer Lickometer circuitry Lickometer in action Part 2: DIY water reward system Introduction Back To Top Graduate school has taken me in some unexpected directions (like teaching a neuroscience course inside a prison), and one of those directions has been the measurement of how and when a mouse licks its tongue. That’s right. We train mice to indicate a decision…