Mice and Machine Learning Help Map the Mind

Mice brains and machine learning may lead to a new way to treat depression, according to a new paper published in the journal Cell and co-authored by Infinia ML Chief Scientist Larry Carin, Ph.D. The paper describes how scientists measured electrical signals in the brains of both observably resilient, active mice and observably depressed, inactive mice. The complexity and scale of the available data, gathered from 18 regions of the brain, then required advanced machine learning for analysis. In effect, scientists trained a learning algorithm to map each brain's connections. They found a pattern in the resilient mice that differed from the depressed. "We wanted to understand the traffic flow of a healthy brain," said Carin, the project's machine learning lead.