It’s been great working with you 😄

@steinmetzneuro.bsky.social

Eva Dyer, Chandramouli Chandrasekaran, Nicholas A. Steinmetz, and Liam Paninski (ran out of characters!)

This work was led by @hanyu42.bsky.social who tirelessly worked to make this possible. In collaboration with Hanrui Lyu, Ethan Yixun Xu, @mostsquares.bsky.social, @kenjilee.bsky.social, Fan Yang, Andrew M. Shelton, Shawn Olsen, Sahar Minavi, Olivier Winter, @intlbrainlab.bsky.social, and

We are still working on the codebase and aim to release a tool soon that users can download, fine-tune, and apply to their own datasets!

We evaluate NEMO on brain region localization by predicting the region of individual neurons (and nearby groups) using only the extracted features, and compare it to baseline methods.

NEMO again outperforms both the VAE-based and supervised approaches.

We scale NEMO to the full IBL Brain-Wide Map dataset: 675 insertions from over 100 animals, yielding 37,017 high-quality neurons.

Without using any labels, NEMO's features align closely with anatomical regions and are consistent across labs.

We benchmark NEMO against two SOTA cell-type classification methods, PhysMAP and a VAE (Beau et al., 2025), using two optotagged datasets from the mouse cerebellum and visual cortex.

NEMO outperforms all baselines, including fully supervised models, with minimal fine-tuning.

We construct a paired dataset of spike trains and waveforms for all neurons, transforming spiking activity into an ACG image (Beau et al., 2025) that captures autocorrelation across firing rates.

NEMO is trained to align ACGs and waveforms in a shared embedding space.

Building on current multimodal cell-type classification methods (Lee et al. 2024 and Beau et al. 2025), we introduce a contrastive learning method for spiking activity and extracellular waveforms called NEMO. 🐟

Paper: Paper: openreview.net/forum?id=10J...
Website: ibl-nemo.github.io

Agreed! But here's a note of caution: in the brain, different behavioral contexts can engage completely different neurons! Julie Lee in our lab published this in 2022 (and I'm still digesting the implications).
"Task specificity in mouse parietal cortex"
www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Wow, this is fascinating. Thanks for sharing!