This project aims to investigate the role of breathing rhythms in behavior and brain activity by integrating respiration measurements into the International Brain Laboratory (IBL) head-fixed decision-making paradigm. Breathing is increasingly recognized as an important physiological signal that can coordinate neural activity across brain regions and influence sensory processing, cognition, and decision-making. The project will develop computational methods to decode respiration directly from orofacial video recordings collected during behavior. By combining ground-truth breathing measurements with high-resolution behavioral video, the team will train and validate models capable of reconstructing breathing signals from video features. If successful, this approach would enable respiration to be inferred from existing video recordings, potentially adding a new physiological dimension to the IBL brain-wide dataset.

The IBL Core will support the project by providing consultation on the design of an IBL-compatible behavioral rig incorporating respiration measurements, guidance on video analysis and pose-tracking pipelines, and advice on data organization compatible with IBL data standards. The collaboration will also support the development of scalable pipelines for video processing and data synchronization. In later stages, the breathing-decoding model may be deployed on IBL datasets to explore how respiration relates to behavior and brain-wide neural activity, while the Cavelli laboratory will develop and validate the decoding algorithms and generate the experimental datasets.