Investigating Astrocytic Responses to Intracortical Microstimulation and Their Modulation by Alertness.

The project examined how animal alertness and stimulation parameters influence astrocyte calcium responses during intracortical microstimulation in the mouse visual cortex. The goal was to determine whether heightened alertness amplifies astrocyte calcium activity during stimulation and how this response changes across stimulation frequencies and over time after electrode implantation. This required integrating neural stimulation data with behavioral measures of alertness to better understand how non-neuronal cells respond during sensory modulation.

The main challenges involved managing large multimodal datasets, correcting inconsistencies in imaging frame rates, and accurately aligning calcium signals with pupil-based measures of alertness. Pupil tracking was automated by training a DeepLabCut model to extract diameter at pixel-level precision, and the source of the frame rate error was traced and corrected in the setup itself, improving data quality for later experiments in the lab. As the analysis progressed, the approach evolved from simple correlation methods to an event-based framework that better captured transient arousal effects. Success was defined by producing reliable, statistically significant results that supported the original hypothesis, resolved key technical issues, and led to a conference presentation and a manuscript currently in preparation.