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Zheng et al (2022) Tutorial

This tutorial demonstrates how we use Pynapple on various publicly available datasets in systems neuroscience to streamline analysis. In this tutorial, we will examine the dataset from Zheng et al (2022), which was used to generate Figure 4c in the publication.

The NWB file for the example used here is provided in this repository. The entire dataset can be downloaded here.

See the documentation of Pynapple for instructions on installing the package.

This tutorial was made by Dhruv Mehrotra.

First, import the necessary libraries:

Warning

This tutorial uses seaborn and matplotlib for displaying the figure as well as the dandi package

You can install all with pip install matplotlib seaborn dandi dandischema

Now, import the necessary libraries:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import pynapple as nap
import seaborn as sns

Stream the data from DANDI

from pynwb import NWBHDF5IO

from dandi.dandiapi import DandiAPIClient
import fsspec
from fsspec.implementations.cached import CachingFileSystem
import h5py

# Enter the session ID and path to the file
dandiset_id, filepath = ("000207", "sub-4/sub-4_ses-4_ecephys.nwb")

with DandiAPIClient() as client:
    asset = client.get_dandiset(dandiset_id, "draft").get_asset_by_path(filepath)
    s3_url = asset.get_content_url(follow_redirects=1, strip_query=True)

# first, create a virtual filesystem based on the http protocol
fs = fsspec.filesystem("http")

# create a cache to save downloaded data to disk (optional)
fs = CachingFileSystem(
    fs=fs,
    cache_storage="nwb-cache",  # Local folder for the cache
)

# next, open the file
file = h5py.File(fs.open(s3_url, "rb"))
io = NWBHDF5IO(file=file, load_namespaces=True)

Parsing the data

The first step is to load the data from the Neurodata Without Borders (NWB) file. This is done as follows:

custom_params = {"axes.spines.right": False, "axes.spines.top": False}
sns.set_theme(style="ticks", palette="colorblind", font_scale=1.5, rc=custom_params)

data = nap.NWBFile(io.read())  # Load the NWB file for this dataset

# What does this look like?
print(data)

Out:

4
┍━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┯━━━━━━━━━━━━━┑
 Keys                      Type        ┝━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┿━━━━━━━━━━━━━┥
 units                     TsGroup      timediscrimination_table  IntervalSet  recognition_table         IntervalSet  encoding_table            IntervalSet  experiment_ids            Tsd          events                    Tsd         ┕━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┷━━━━━━━━━━━━━┙

Get spike timings

spikes = data["units"]

What does this look like?

print(spikes)

Out:

Index    rate     x      y       z       imp    location           filtering    group_name    origChannel
-------  -------  -----  ------  ------  -----  -----------------  -----------  ------------  -------------
0        7.0009   26.63  -15.83  -16.49  nan    hippocampus_right  300-3000Hz   micros        139.0
1        7.24478  26.63  -15.83  -16.49  nan    hippocampus_right  300-3000Hz   micros        139.0
2        6.09486  26.63  -15.83  -16.49  nan    hippocampus_right  300-3000Hz   micros        140.0
3        6.91548  26.63  -15.83  -16.49  nan    hippocampus_right  300-3000Hz   micros        142.0
...      ...      ...    ...     ...     ...    ...                ...          ...           ...
31       2.3282   26.63  -15.83  -16.49  nan    hippocampus_right  300-3000Hz   micros        191.0
32       0.31052  26.63  -15.83  -16.49  nan    hippocampus_right  300-3000Hz   micros        191.0
33       0.69087  26.63  -15.83  -16.49  nan    hippocampus_right  300-3000Hz   micros        191.0
34       0.65578  26.63  -15.83  -16.49  nan    hippocampus_right  300-3000Hz   micros        192.0

This TsGroup has, among other information, the mean firing rate of the unit, the X, Y and Z coordinates, the brain region the unit was recorded from, and the channel number on which the unit was located.

Next, let's get the encoding table of all stimulus times, as shown below:

encoding_table = data["encoding_table"]

# What does this look like?
print(encoding_table)

Out:

    start_time   stop_time  fixcross_time  ExperimentID  boundary1_time  boundary2_time  boundary3_time  stimCategory  Clip_name
id                                                                                                                              
0     1.068463    9.101330       0.056555          70.0        5.068463             NaN             NaN             0  NB_24.mp4
1    10.182342   18.114558       9.116686          70.0       12.880601       14.434447             NaN             1  SB_23.mp4
2    19.071072   27.137388      18.130498          70.0       23.071072             NaN             NaN             2  HB_20.mp4
3    28.160476   36.390234      27.154926          70.0       32.160475             NaN             NaN             0  NB_26.mp4
4    37.470909   44.584497      36.409347          70.0       41.470909             NaN             NaN             0  NB_25.mp4
..         ...         ...            ...           ...             ...             ...             ...           ...        ...
85  892.755233  900.921092     891.747973          70.0      898.284193             NaN             NaN             1   SB_2.mp4
86  901.906850  910.171979     900.940121          70.0      905.906850             NaN             NaN             2  HB_27.mp4
87  911.138396  919.335950     910.190938          70.0      915.138396      912.697926      917.067151             2  HB_10.mp4
88  920.363950  928.329845     919.354902          70.0      921.906193      923.478531      924.924117             1  SB_27.mp4
89  930.639635  939.073029     929.718098          70.0      932.997106      934.191369             NaN             1  SB_25.mp4

[90 rows x 9 columns]

This table has, among other things, the scene boundary times for which we will plot the peri-event time histogram (PETH).

There are 3 types of scene boundaries in this data. For the purposes of demonstration, we will use only the "No boundary" (NB) and the "Hard boundary" (HB conditions). The encoding table has a stimCategory field, which tells us the type of boundary corresponding to a given trial.

stimCategory = np.array(
    encoding_table.stimCategory
)  # Get the scene boundary type for all trials

# What does this look like?
print(stimCategory)

Out:

[0 1 2 0 0 0 1 0 2 1 2 0 2 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 2 0 0 2 0 1 0 2 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 2 2
 2 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 2 1 1 0 2 1 0 2 2 2 0 1 0 1 1 2 2 0 2 2 2 1 1 2 1 0 2 2 1
 0 1 2 0 2 2 1 1 1 1 2 1 2 2 1 1]

Trials marked 0 correspond to NB, while trials marked 2 correspond to HB. Let's extract the trial numbers for NB and HB trials, as shown below:

indxNB = np.where(stimCategory == 0)  # NB trial indices
indxHB = np.where(stimCategory == 2)  # HB trial indices

The encoding table also has 3 types of boundary times. For the purposes of our demonstration, we will focus on boundary1 times, and extract them as shown below:

boundary1_time = np.array(encoding_table.boundary1_time)  # Get timings of Boundary1

# What does this look like?
print(boundary1_time)

Out:

[  5.06846275  12.88060075  23.071072    32.1604755   41.470909
  49.5747065   56.07442325  72.803867    82.1299925   92.77667275
  99.9925845  109.0787315  118.0778575  133.12435825 140.94827125
 147.8236585  160.726736   170.441769   183.29262575 191.11327175
 199.63382425 208.5142425  217.6186295  232.62687825 241.7270365
 250.58327775 259.5545145  268.6661045  278.026902   287.04517875
 301.2426685  310.21093375 319.1822215  328.13037175 337.16751875
 363.737004   372.785663   381.86749625 391.2704085  400.5077995
 407.28660475 416.0272855  431.792285   441.75272875 448.88401175
 456.97766275 463.88864475 472.13035175 490.53584775 499.7064625
 507.6917495  518.78793775 528.140675   537.1412335  552.5116415
 562.4287995  569.44012625 580.99649325 591.974217   597.74463025
 608.3638655  624.44389125 633.4175285  642.3969695  651.776966
 660.699774   676.9439885  681.3602465  692.799878   699.53861175
 711.341688   720.4819275  729.43782175 772.99961425 780.19490625
 788.1175045  798.34264525 807.54519    817.25781375 835.1736475
 842.54760125 852.294991   861.40924725 868.63873425 887.93252325
 898.284193   905.9068505  915.1383965  921.90619325 932.99710575]

This contains the timings of all boundaries in this block of trials. Note that we also have the type of boundary for each trial. Let's store the NB and HB boundary timings in separate variables, as Pynapple Ts objects:

NB = nap.Ts(boundary1_time[indxNB])  # NB timings
HB = nap.Ts(boundary1_time[indxHB])  # HB timings

Peri-Event Time Histogram (PETH)

A PETH is a plot where we align a variable of interest (for example, spikes) to an external event (in this case, to boundary times). This visualization helps us infer relationships between the two.

For our demonstration, we will align the spikes of the first unit, which is located in the hippocampus, to the times of NB and HB. You can do a quick check to verify that the first unit is indeed located in the hippocampus, we leave it to you.

With Pynapple, PETHs can be computed with a single line of code!

NB_peth = nap.compute_perievent(
    spikes[0], NB, minmax=(-0.5, 1)
)  # Compute PETH of unit aligned to NB, for -0.5 to 1s windows
HB_peth = nap.compute_perievent(
    spikes[0], HB, minmax=(-0.5, 1)
)  # Compute PETH of unit aligned to HB, for -0.5 to 1s windows

Let's plot the PETH

plt.figure(figsize =(15,8))
plt.subplot(211)  # Plot the figures in 2 rows
for i, n in enumerate(NB_peth):
    plt.plot(
        NB_peth[n].as_units("s").fillna(i),
        "o",
        color=[102 / 255, 204 / 255, 0 / 255],
        markersize=4,
    )  # Plot PETH
plt.axvline(0, linewidth=2, color="k", linestyle="--")  # Plot a line at t = 0
plt.yticks([0, 30])  # Set ticks on Y-axis
plt.gca().set_yticklabels(["1", "30"])  # Label the ticks
plt.xlabel("Time from NB (s)")  # Time from boundary in seconds, on X-axis
plt.ylabel("Trial Number")  # Trial number on Y-axis

plt.subplot(212)
for i, n in enumerate(HB_peth):
    plt.plot(
        HB_peth[n].as_units("s").fillna(i),
        "o",
        color=[255 / 255, 99 / 255, 71 / 255],
        markersize=4,
    )  # Plot PETH
plt.axvline(0, linewidth=2, color="k", linestyle="--")  # Plot a line at t = 0
plt.yticks([0, 30])  # Set ticks on Y-axis
plt.gca().set_yticklabels(["1", "30"])  # Label the ticks
plt.xlabel("Time from HB (s)")  # Time from boundary in seconds, on X-axis
plt.ylabel("Trial Number")  # Trial number on Y-axis
plt.subplots_adjust(wspace=0.2, hspace=0.5, top=0.85)

tutorial human dataset

Awesome! From the PETH, we can see that this neuron fires after boundary onset in HB trials. This is an example of what the authors describe here as a boundary cell.


PETH of firing rate for NB and HB cells

Now that we have the PETH of spiking, we can go one step further. We will plot the mean firing rate of this cell aligned to the boundary for each trial type. Doing this in Pynapple is very simple!

Use Pynapple to compute binned spike counts

bin_size = 0.01
counts_NB = NB_peth.count(bin_size)  # Spike counts binned in 10ms steps, for NB trials
counts_HB = HB_peth.count(bin_size)  # Spike counts binned in 10ms steps, for HB trials

Compute firing rate for both trial types

fr_NB = counts_NB / bin_size
fr_HB = counts_HB / bin_size

Smooth the firing rate with a gaussian window with std=4*bin_size

counts_NB = counts_NB.smooth(bin_size*4)
counts_HB = counts_HB.smooth(bin_size*4)

Compute the mean firing rate for both trial types

meanfr_NB = fr_NB.mean(axis=1)
meanfr_HB = fr_HB.mean(axis=1)

Compute standard error of mean (SEM) of the firing rate for both trial types

from scipy.stats import sem
error_NB = sem(fr_NB, axis=1)
error_HB = sem(fr_HB, axis=1)

Plot the mean +/- SEM of firing rate for both trial types

plt.figure(figsize =(15,8))
plt.plot(
    meanfr_NB, color=[102 / 255, 204 / 255, 0 / 255], label="NB"
)  # Plot mean firing rate for NB trials

# Plot SEM for NB trials
plt.fill_between(
    meanfr_NB.index.values,
    meanfr_NB.values - error_NB,
    meanfr_NB.values + error_NB,
    color=[102 / 255, 204 / 255, 0 / 255],
    alpha=0.2,
)

plt.plot(
    meanfr_HB, color=[255 / 255, 99 / 255, 71 / 255], label="HB"
)  # Plot mean firing rate for HB trials

# Plot SEM for NB trials
plt.fill_between(
    meanfr_HB.index.values,
    meanfr_HB.values - error_HB,
    meanfr_HB.values + error_HB,
    color=[255 / 255, 99 / 255, 71 / 255],
    alpha=0.2,
)

plt.axvline(0, linewidth=2, color="k", linestyle="--")  # Plot a line at t = 0
plt.xlabel("Time from boundary (s)")  # Time from boundary in seconds, on X-axis
plt.ylabel("Firing rate (Hz)")  # Firing rate in Hz on Y-axis
plt.legend(loc="upper right")

tutorial human dataset

Out:

<matplotlib.legend.Legend object at 0x7f294c685110>

This plot verifies what we visualized in the PETH rasters above, that this cell responds to a hard boundary. Hence, it is a boundary cell. To learn more about these cells, please check out the original study here.

I hope this tutorial was helpful. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to reach out to the Pynapple Team!

Total running time of the script: ( 0 minutes 1.565 seconds)

Download Python source code: tutorial_human_dataset.py

Download Jupyter notebook: tutorial_human_dataset.ipynb

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