Presented By: Biomedical Engineering
BME Master's Thesis Defense - Mingxiao Zhang
Department of Biomedical Engineering Master’s Thesis Defense
Mingxiao Zhang
Hardware Design, Integration and Optimization of a Virtual Reality Environment for Rodent Cortical Neuronal Recordings
Understanding neural circuits often requires innovative and custom-designed behavioral setups. A head-fixed virtual reality (VR) system for rodents offers a number of advantages in terms of being able to investigate and manipulate neural circuits involved in both normal behaviors and in pathological brain states. A complete VR experimental system to investigate cortical neurons of rodents consists of three vital parts: 1) a hardware system with recording and reward functionality; 2) a software system to process, analyze and report the signals and also to control the logical flow of experiments; 3) a hardware-software interface to link these two systems. The current project focused on the design of the hardware interface, the optimization of the communication between the software system and multiple hardware systems, the locomotion-recording system, and the displacement/speed analysis from the locomotion-recording system. This functional VR system has enabled high resolution neural recordings in the study of precise behaviors.
Chair: Tim Bruns, PhD.
Mingxiao Zhang
Hardware Design, Integration and Optimization of a Virtual Reality Environment for Rodent Cortical Neuronal Recordings
Understanding neural circuits often requires innovative and custom-designed behavioral setups. A head-fixed virtual reality (VR) system for rodents offers a number of advantages in terms of being able to investigate and manipulate neural circuits involved in both normal behaviors and in pathological brain states. A complete VR experimental system to investigate cortical neurons of rodents consists of three vital parts: 1) a hardware system with recording and reward functionality; 2) a software system to process, analyze and report the signals and also to control the logical flow of experiments; 3) a hardware-software interface to link these two systems. The current project focused on the design of the hardware interface, the optimization of the communication between the software system and multiple hardware systems, the locomotion-recording system, and the displacement/speed analysis from the locomotion-recording system. This functional VR system has enabled high resolution neural recordings in the study of precise behaviors.
Chair: Tim Bruns, PhD.
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