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Experimental work across species has demonstrated that spontaneously generated behaviors are robustly coupled to variations in neural activity within the cerebral cortex. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data suggest that temporal correlations in cortical networks vary across distinct behavioral states, providing for the dynamic reorganization of patterned activity. However, these data generally lack the temporal resolution to establish links between cortical signals and the continuously varying fluctuations in spontaneous behavior observed in awake animals. Here, we used wide-field mesoscopic calcium imaging to monitor cortical dynamics in awake mice and developed an approach to quantify rapidly time-varying functional connectivity. We show that spontaneous behaviors are represented by fast changes in both the magnitude and correlational structure of cortical network activity. Combining mesoscopic imaging with simultaneous cellular-resolution two-photon microscopy demonstrated that correlations among neighboring neurons and between local and large-scale networks also encode behavior. Finally, the dynamic functional connectivity of mesoscale signals revealed subnetworks not predicted by traditional anatomical atlas-based parcellation of the cortex. These results provide new insights into how behavioral information is represented across the neocortex and demonstrate an analytical framework for investigating time-varying functional connectivity in neural networks.

Confinement breaks translational and rotational symmetry in materials and makes all physical properties functions of position. Such spatial variations are key to modulating material properties at the nanoscale, and characterizing them accurately is therefore an intense area of research in the molecular simulations community. This is relatively easy to accomplish for basic mechanical observables. Determining spatial profiles of transport properties, such as diffusivity, is, however, much more challenging, as it requires calculating position-dependent autocorrelations of mechanical observables. In our previous paper (Domingues, T.S.; Coifman, R.; Haji-Akbari, A. J. Phys. Chem. B2023, 127, 5273 10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c00670), we analytically derive and numerically validate a set of filtered covariance estimators (FCEs) for quantifying spatial variations of the diffusivity tensor from stochastic trajectories. In this work, we adapt these estimators to extract diffusivity profiles from MD trajectories and validate them by applying them to a Lennard-Jones fluid within a slit pore. We find our MD-adapted estimator to exhibit the same qualitative features as its stochastic counterpart, as it accurately estimates the lateral diffusivity across the pore while systematically underestimating the normal diffusivity close to hard boundaries. We introduce a conceptually simple and numerically efficient correction scheme based on simulated annealing and diffusion maps to resolve the latter artifact and obtain normal diffusivity profiles that are consistent with the self-part of the van Hove correlation functions. Our findings demonstrate the potential of this MD-adapted estimator in accurately characterizing spatial variations of diffusivity in confined materials.

Materials under confinement can possess properties that deviate considerably from their bulk counterparts. Indeed, confinement makes all physical properties position-dependent and possibly anisotropic, and characterizing such spatial variations and directionality has been an intense area of focus in experimental and computational studies of confined matter. While this task is fairly straightforward for simple mechanical observables, it is far more daunting for transport properties such as diffusivity that can only be estimated from autocorrelations of mechanical observables. For instance, there are well established methods for estimating diffusivity from experimentally observed or computationally generated trajectories in bulk systems. No rigorous generalizations of such methods, however, exist for confined systems. In this work, we present two filtered covariance estimators for computing anisotropic and position-dependent diffusivity tensors and validate them by applying them to stochastic trajectories generated according to known diffusivity profiles. These estimators can accurately capture spatial variations that span over several orders of magnitude and that assume different functional forms. Our kernel-based approach is also very robust to implementation details such as the localization function and time discretization and performs significantly better than estimators that are solely based on local covariance. Moreover, the kernel function does not have to be localized and can instead belong to a dictionary of orthogonal functions. Therefore, the proposed estimator can be readily used to obtain functional estimates of diffusivity rather than a tabulated collection of pointwise estimates. Nonetheless, the susceptibility of the proposed estimators to time discretization is higher at the immediate vicinity of hard boundaries. We demonstrate this heightened susceptibility to be common among all covariance-based estimators.

We propose methods of both slow and rapid post-processing of signals for erasure of artifacts that arise in the process of thresholding and quantization. We use wavelets as tools to define constraints and variational functionals as measures of complexity of signals. The methods come from analyses of different possibilities of blending variational calculus and wavelet multiresolution in ways that appear to be natural.

We construct a new adaptive basis of functions which is reasonably well localized with only one peak in frequency. We develop a compression algorithm that exploits this basis to obtain the most economical representation of the image in terms of textured patterns with different orientations, frequencies, sizes, and positions. The technique directly works in the Fourier domain and has potential applications for compression of highly textured images, texture analysis, etc.

We describe an extension to the “best-basis” method to select an orthonormal basis suitable for signal/image classification problems from a large collection of orthonormal bases consisting of wavelet packets or local trigonometric bases. The original best-basis algorithm selects a basis minimizing entropy from such a “library of orthonormal bases” whereas the proposed algorithm selects a basis maximizing a certain discriminant measure (e.g., relative entropy) among classes. Once such a basis is selected, a small number of most significant coordinates (features) are fed into a traditional classifier such as Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) or Classification and Regression Tree (CARTTM). The performance of these statistical methods is enhanced since the proposed methods reduce the dimensionality of the problem at hand without losing important information for that problem. Here, the basis functions which are well-localized in the time-frequency plane are used as feature extractors. We applied our method to two signal classification problems and an image texture classification problem. These experiments show the superiority of our method over the direct application of these classifiers on the input signals. As a further application, we also describe a method to extract signal component from data consisting of signal and textured background.

Suppose an ergodic flow acts on a probability space 𝔐 enabling us to introduce the Ergodic Hilbert transform f̃of f∈ Lp(𝔐), 1 ≦ p≦ ∞. H1is the class of all functions of the form f+ if̃∈ L1(𝔐). We show that H1can be characterized in terms of a class of maximal functions; moreover, the dual space of H1is identified with a space of functions of bounded mean oscillation defined in terms of the flow.

Characterizations of Fourier transforms of boundary distributions of functions in Hp(R) or Hp(T), 0 < p≤ 1, are given. These results are applied to obtain Fourier multiplier theorems on Hp.