Assessing spontaneous sensory neuron activity using in vivo calcium imaging
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT: Heightened spontaneous activity in sensory neurons is often reported in individuals living with chronic pain. It is possible to study this activity in rodents using electrophysiology, but these experiments require great skill and can be prone to bias. Here, we have examined whether in vivo calcium imaging with GCaMP6s can be used as an alternative approach. We show that spontaneously active calcium transients can be visualised in the fourth lumbar dorsal root ganglion (L4 DRG) through in vivo imaging in a mouse model of inflammatory pain. Application of lidocaine to the nerve, between the inflamed site and the DRG, silenced spontaneous firing and revealed the true baseline level of calcium for spontaneously active neurons. We used these data to train a machine learning algorithm to predict when a neuron is spontaneously active. We show that our algorithm is accurate in 2 different models of pain: intraplantar complete Freund adjuvant and antigen-induced arthritis, with accuracies of 90.0% ±1.2 and 85.9% ±2.1, respectively, assessed against visual inspection by an experienced observer. The algorithm can also detect neuronal activity in imaging experiments generated in a different laboratory using a different microscope configuration (accuracy = 94.0% ±2.2). We conclude that in vivo calcium imaging can be used to assess spontaneous activity in sensory neurons and provide a Google Colaboratory Notebook to allow anyone easy access to our novel analysis tool, for the assessment of spontaneous neuronal activity in their own imaging setups.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".