Automatic Identification of Functionally Equivalent Olfactory Glomeruli across Individuals

A key problem faced during the interpretation of calcium imaging data in sensory pathways is identifying brain regions which are be functionally equivalent, i.e. that respond in a correlated fashion to a set of stimuli presented over many trails - such as glomeruli are thought to be in the olfactory system. Here we present a novel automated method for detecting these correlations in neighbouring brain regions which uses only the physiological response characteristics to registrate them across individuals. After applying linear transformations for perspective correction, we show using this method how glomeruli positioning and response tuning during early olfactory coding is largely conserved across individuals of the same species, but there remains some variability. Our algorithm allows us to study the generalised properties of neural coding in different sensory systems or other brain regions, independently from such variations.