  Two-photon laser scanning microscopy is widely used in a quickly growing
field of neuroscience. It is a fluorescence imaging technique that allows
imaging of living tissue up to a very high depth to study inherent brain
structure and circuitry. Our project deals with examining images from
two-photon calcium imaging, a brain-imaging technique that allows for study of
neuronal activity in hundreds of neurons and and. As statisticians, we worked
to apply various methods to better understand the sources of variations that
are inherent in neuroimages from this imaging technique that are not part of
the controlled experiment. Thus, images can be made available for studying the
effects of physical stimulation on the working brain. Currently there is no
system to examine and prepare such brain images. Thus we worked to develop
methods to work towards this end. Our data set had images of a rat's brain in
two states. In the first state the rat is sedated and merely observed and in
the other it is repeatedly simulated via electric shocks. We first started by
controlling for the movement of the brain to more accurately observe the
physical characteristics of the brain. We analyzed how the variance of the
brain images varied between pre and post stimulus by applying Levene's Test.
Furthermore, we were able to measure how much the images were shifted to see
the overall change in movement of the brain due to electrical stimulus.
Therefore, we were able to visually observe how the brain structure and
variance change due to stimulus effects in rat brains.
