Data Science In Olfaction
This work addresses the problem of measuring and analyzing smell for researchers and industries, but it is incremental as it builds on existing neural sensing technology and presents preliminary results.
The paper tackles the challenge of understanding olfaction by conceptualizing smell from a Data Science and AI perspective, focusing on odorant-receptor interactions, and presents initial results using machine learning to classify neural responses to odors in mice.
Advances in neural sensing technology are making it possible to observe the olfactory process in great detail. In this paper, we conceptualize smell from a Data Science and AI perspective, that relates the properties of odorants to how they are sensed and analyzed in the olfactory system from the nose to the brain. Drawing distinctions to color vision, we argue that smell presents unique measurement challenges, including the complexity of stimuli, the high dimensionality of the sensory apparatus, as well as what constitutes ground truth. In the face of these challenges, we argue for the centrality of odorant-receptor interactions in developing a theory of olfaction. Such a theory is likely to find widespread industrial applications, and enhance our understanding of smell, and in the longer-term, how it relates to other senses and language. As an initial use case of the data, we present results using machine learning-based classification of neural responses to odors as they are recorded in the mouse olfactory bulb with calcium imaging.