Data Analysis Solutions - Fiber Photometry

danse™ is a powerful data analysis platform tailored for neuroscientists using fiber photometry and behavioral data. With intuitive workflows, create pipelines that automate multiple operations (Remove artifacts, z-ΔF/F0, Find Spikes, PeriEvent, etc.), without any coding required. The software also imports and aligns behavior data from non-Doric sources (videos, csv, DIO, etc.).

Beyond single recording analyses, danse™ easily pools multi-animal data according to your experimental design and re-run analyses effortlessly with new parameters—saving time and accelerating publications.

Automate your entire analysis pipeline with danse™

Danse™ is compatible with both Doric and non-Doric fiber photometry and behavior data. Several import and conversion operations will be covered in the description below.

GETTING STARTED with Danse™

STEP 1 - Create a project

Organize datasets acording to the experimental design (trials, groups, treatments, etc.).

STEP 2 - Create a pipeline

Chain multiple operations together and run each pipeline over all your data files

STEP 3 - Group Analysis

Pool data from multiple animals together according to the experimental design.

This 10-minute guid covers an overview of the danse™ analysis workflow:

FIBER PHOTOMETRY OPERATIONS

Over a dozen fiber photometry operations are available and can be selected for batch processing. Here are a few highlights and their tutorial videos:

This multi-steps operation includes removing the baseline, smoothing the signal, substracting the isosbestic trace to remove motion artifacts and optionnal standardization.

Detects peaks in your fiber photometry signal. New feature (not in video): multiple iterations find smaller spikes and smooth the data to reduce false positives.

See FAQ section below for common mistakes and troubleshooting. For feature updates see our monthly newsletter on Linkedin.

BEHAVIOR OPERATIONS

Danse™ provides a large number of behavior operations for both Doric and non-doric behavior videos, digital and analog signals.

IMPORT BEHAVIOR DATA

Danse™ provides multiple different ways to import data from many different sources (Noldus, ANY-Maze, MedAssociate, DeepLabCut, etc.) and in different formats (video or csv file).

Calculate Animal Coordinates

Whether importing videos or using Doric Behavior Camera or CamLoop, Danse™ can directly process animal behavior within the software

ANIMAL TRACKING

POSE ESTIMATION

Next, the animal coordinates can be used to compute the following measures.

Calculate Speed

Presence in Zone

Distance From Point

Each measure (speed, etc.) can be fed into the Create Behavior Events below.

CREATE BEHAVIOR EVENTS

This operation outputs timestamps of behavior or stimuli that occured during the fiber photometry recording.These timestamps can be only the onset, only the offset or onset-offset pairs.

These timestamps are called Events in danse and are important for operation combining neural and behavior data together.

Behavior events can be created from imported .csv data, manually-entered timepoints, from recorded digital (TTL) or analog signals, or from measures created in danse™(speed, motion score presence in zone, distance from point, etc.).

Behavior events are required inputs for PeriEvent and Signal Statistics plots.

Here are examples of both digital and continuous measures converted into events.

CREATE TIME PERIODS

Use Create Time Periods feature to examine how neural activity changes over time and/or to grad a subset of behavior events ocurring at certain time points.

Manual Time Periods: Define windows of varying lengths where the animal encoutered or experianceed different conctexts (Baseline vs manipulation, new cage, drug injection, etc.).

Auto-Time Periods: Divide the entire recording into even time windows (seconds, minutes, hours).

COMBINE FIBER PHOTOMETRY & BEHAVIOR DATA

The core strength of the danse™ software is opreations that combine behavior and neural data:

Perievent

Perievent Histograms (also called peri-stimulus time histograms or PSTHs) visualizes changes in neural activity in response to the onset (or offset) of a stimulus or behavior of interst (i.e event). This plot is calculated by aligning and averaging the ΔF/F0 centered arount that. This results in a histogram that shows the average neural response over time.

Statistics associated to the PeriEvents trace are also calculated, including Aera-under-the-curve (AUC), maximum, minimum, etc.

Plot perievent as a heatmap. For single animal perievents, each row corresponds to an event (trial/bout), while for group analysis perievents, each row corresponds to the average trace of one animal.

SPATIAL SIGNAL

Combine neural activity and animal tracking data into a spatial signal heatmap. The x and y axes of the heatmap corespond to the cage dimensions and the color is associated with the average ΔF/F0 when the animal was in this location. Spatial Signal operation is ideal for analysis such as condition-place preference, Plus-maze, novel object, animal interactions and hippocampal place cells, among many others.

SIGNAL STATISTICS

The Signal Statistic operation examines changes in neural activity ovver the duration of the entire duration of an event/time preiod (i.e not just the onset/offset of the event). This operation is ideal for behaviors of varying lengths (freezing, entering zone, animal interactions, etc.).

Calculate the following statistics:

z-ΔF/F0 : AUC, mean, median, max, min
Spikes : amplitude, firing rate, # spikes

EXPORT FIGURES & DATA

danse™ allows for easy data export, either as figures (.pdf, .png, .jpeg) or as .csv files.

FAQ

What if each file has multiple animals recorded together?

Use Split Operation to divide the file into multiple files (on per animal).

How to split-multi-animal data into separate file

How do I convert non-Doric fiber phohometry data?

Many fiber photomery data are compatible with danse™, including Tucker Davis Technology (TDT), Neurophotometrics, RWD and any cusotm systems(.csv/.xlsl). Several conversion operations are available: