Frontiers in Neuroinformatics (May 2009)
Brainlab: a Python toolkit to aid in the design, simulation, and analysis of spiking neural networks with the NeoCortical Simulator
Abstract
Neuroscience modeling experiments often involve multiple complex neural network and cell model variants, complex input stimuli and input protocols, followed by complex data analysis. Coordinating all this complexity becomes a central difficulty for the experimenter. The Python programming language, along with its extensive library packages, has emerged as a leading ``glue'' tool for managing all sorts of complex programmatictasks. This paper describes a toolkit called Brainlab, written in Python, that leverages Python's strengths for the task of managing the general complexity of neuroscience modeling experiments. Brainlab was also designed to overcome the major difficulties of working with the NCS environment in particular. Brainlab is an integrated model building, experimentation, and data analysis environment for the powerful parallel spiking neural network simulator system NCS (the NeoCortical Simulator).
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