DAN is applied to gain better understanding of the neural foundation of information processing in the brain.The main idea of this project is to implement and to develop a new user-friendly software.


A critical feature of brain theories is whether neurons convey a noisy rate code or a precise temporal code. One of most valuable ways to test these theories consists in collecting the electrophysiological activity of cell assemblies under several experimental conditions. The sequences of cell discharges–the spike trains–form time series whose dynamics is strongly related to the information processing carried out in the brain areas under study.
The targeted users of DAN are graduate and PhD students as well as senior scientists working in electrophysiology. We expect that these people work in a University, High School or other public or private educational department. The number of users cannot be expected because DAN is only a partial set of our Virtual laboratory that expanded with several modules since the beginning of the project . The original programs designed for electrophysiological analyses have been generalized in order to accept data of several types of discrete time series. A current field of interest is represented by the simulation of neural networks. In this field we are carrying out an important collaboration with the simulation program called XNBC developed at the Jean-François Vibert’s laboratory B3E.
The overall objective of this project is to create an integrated multi-platform software allowing the neuroscience research scientist, starting at the level of graduate students, to perform a comprehensive series of electrophysiological data analyses without the need of a long training with a computer specific software. This goal can be achieved by means of using the Internet browser as a multipurpose graphic terminal. The possibility to use remote computers for data analysis represents an important feature of the framework DAN and is based on the powerful network features provided by the Java language. Our purpose is to provide a user-friendly computational framework that is compatible with a more general concept of ‘Virtual laboratory’, i.e. a laboratory where data collection, computational power for analysis and display of results can be distributed over a computer network, like Internet.

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References
- Abeles, M. (1982) Local cortical Circuits: an electrophysiological study, Springer Verlag, Berlin.
- Abeles, M. (1991) Corticotronics: neural circuits of the cerebral cortex, Cambridge Univiversity Press, Cambridge.
- Rieke, F., Warland, D., de Ruyter van Steveninck, R. R., Bialek, W. (1997) Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code, Cambridge, Massachussets, MIT Press.
- Miller, R., ed. (2000) Time and the Brain, Harwood Academic Publishers, Singapour.

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