Movie reconstruction from mouse visual cortex activity

The ability to reconstruct images represented by the brain has the potential to give us an intuitive understanding of what the brain sees. Reconstruction of visual input from human fMRI data has garnered significant attention in recent years. Comparatively less focus has been directed towards vision reconstruction from single-cell recordings, despite its potential to provide a more direct measure of the information represented by the brain. Here, we achieve high-quality reconstructions of natural movies presented to mice, from the activity of neurons in their visual cortex for the first time. Using our method of video optimization via backpropagation through a state-of-the-art dynamic neural encoding model, we reliably reconstruct 10 s movies at 30 Hz from two-photon calcium imaging data. We achieve a pixel-level correlation of 0.57 between ground-truth movies and single-trial reconstructions. Previous reconstructions based on awake mouse V1 neuronal responses to static images achieved a pixel-level correlation of 0.24 over a similar retinotopic area. We find that critical for high-quality reconstructions are the number of neurons in the dataset and the use of model ensembling. This paves the way for movie reconstruction to be used as a tool to investigate a variety of visual processing phenomena.