Developments in understanding neuronal spike trains and functional specializations in brain regions

  • Authors:
  • Roberto A. Santiago;James McNames;Kim Burchiel;George G. Lendaris

  • Affiliations:
  • NW Computational Intelligence Laboratory, System Science, Portland State University;Biomedical Signal Processing Laboratory, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Portland State University;Department of Neurological Surgery, Oregon Health Sciences University;NW Computational Intelligence Laboratory, System Science, Portland State University

  • Venue:
  • Neural Networks - 2003 Special issue: Advances in neural networks research — IJCNN'03
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Understanding information processing at the neuronal level would provide valuable insights to computational intelligence research and computational neuroscience. In particular, understanding constraints on neuronal spike trains would provide indication about the type of syntactic rules used by neurons when processing information. A recent discovery, reported here, was made through analyzing microelectrode recordings (MER) made during surgical procedure in humans. Analysis of MERs of extracellular neuronal activity has gained increasing interest due to potential improvements to surgical techniques involving ablation or placement of deep brain stimulators, done in the treatment of advanced Parkinson's disease. Important to these procedures is the identification of different brain structures such as the globus pallidus internus from the spike train being recorded from the intracranial probe tip during surgery. Spike train data gathered during surgical procedure from multiple patients were processed using a novel feature extraction method reported here. Distinct structures within the spike trains were identified and used to build an effective brain region classifier. The extracted features upon analysis provide some insight into the 'syntactic' constraint on spike trains.