Our VR paper is out!

Excited to share our new bioRxiv preprint from the Yildirim Lab:

“Deterministically Synchronized Widefield Imaging and Virtual Reality Platform for Multimodal Brain–Behavior Recording”

In this work, we developed a hardware-synchronized widefield calcium imaging and virtual reality (VR) platform that enables millisecond-precision alignment between:

• Brain-wide neural activity

• Pupil dynamics

• Orofacial behavior

• Locomotion

• Closed-loop VR environments

A major challenge in multimodal neuroscience experiments is that software-based synchronization can introduce latency, jitter, and timing drift — making it difficult to accurately study fast brain–behavior interactions. Our system addresses this by integrating all acquisition subsystems under a shared hardware-defined clock with deterministic synchronization and quantitatively validated timing performance.

Key features of the platform include:

🔹 Widefield cortical imaging with dual-wavelength hemodynamic correction

🔹 Simultaneous high-speed pupil and face recordings

🔹 Closed-loop VR integration with both ViRMEn and Blender

🔹 ~1.5 ms locomotion-to-VR update latency

🔹 Multimodal analyses including connectivity, motif extraction, spectral dynamics, and machine learning-based brain–behavior prediction

Using this framework, we demonstrate that mesoscale cortical activity during behavior is highly structured, low-dimensional, and strongly coupled to behavioral state variables such as locomotion and pupil dynamics.

This project represents a highly collaborative effort across neuroscience, engineering, optics, VR, and AI.

Great work led by another talented student Miguel Maldonado and we are grateful to everyone in the Yildirim Lab for their contributions.

Preprint: https://lnkd.in/gSe-H46D

Thanks to The National Institutes of Health Cleveland Clinic Research Case Comprehensive Cancer Center American Brain Tumor Association for their support!