New Tools Help Neuroscientists Analyze Big Data

In a recent study published in the journal Nature Methods, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, have used new technology to quickly find patterns in high-resolution images collected from the brains of active zebrafish and mice. The technology (named “Thunder”) can quickly analyze data sets so large and complex they would normally take days or weeks to analyze on a single workstation. Researchers used Thunder to analyze imaging data from a new microscope that was developed to monitor the activity of nearly every individual cells in the brain of a zebrafish, as it behaves in response to visual stimuli. Thunder can run on a private cluster or on Amazon’s cloud computing services. Neuroscientists rarely arrive at new insights about the brain the first time they consider their data. “Being able to apply these analyses quickly — one after the other — is important. Speed gives a researchers more flexibility to explore and get new ideas,” said a lead author of the study. Distributed computing was one solution to accelerate analysis while exploring the full richness of a data set, but many alternatives are available. To read more about this study, click here.