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A method for decoding the neurophysiological spike-response transform.

ABSTRACT: Many physiological responses elicited by neuronal spikes-intracellular calcium transients, synaptic potentials, muscle contractions-are built up of discrete, elementary responses to each spike. However, the spikes occur in trains of arbitrary temporal complexity, and each elementary response not only sums with previous ones, but can itself be modified by the previous history of the activity. A basic goal in system identification is to characterize the spike-response transform in terms of a small number of functions-the elementary response kernel and additional kernels or functions that describe the dependence on previous history-that will predict the response to any arbitrary spike train. Here we do this by developing further and generalizing the "synaptic decoding" approach of Sen et al. (1996). Given the spike times in a train and the observed overall response, we use least-squares minimization to construct the best estimated response and at the same time best estimates of the elementary response kernel and the other functions that characterize the spike-response transform. We avoid the need for any specific initial assumptions about these functions by using techniques of mathematical analysis and linear algebra that allow us to solve simultaneously for all of the numerical function values treated as independent parameters. The functions are such that they may be interpreted mechanistically. We examine the performance of the method as applied to synthetic data. We then use the method to decode real synaptic and muscle contraction transforms.

SUBMITTER: Stern E

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2767462 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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A method for decoding the neurophysiological spike-response transform.

Stern Estee E García-Crescioni Keyla K Miller Mark W MW Peskin Charles S CS Brezina Vladimir V

Journal of neuroscience methods 20090818 2

Many physiological responses elicited by neuronal spikes-intracellular calcium transients, synaptic potentials, muscle contractions-are built up of discrete, elementary responses to each spike. However, the spikes occur in trains of arbitrary temporal complexity, and each elementary response not only sums with previous ones, but can itself be modified by the previous history of the activity. A basic goal in system identification is to characterize the spike-response transform in terms of a small ...[more]

PMID: 19695289

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Project description:Traditionally, the key step before decoding motor intentions from cortical recordings is spike sorting, the process of identifying which neuron was responsible for an action potential. Recently, researchers have started investigating approaches to decoding which omit the spike sorting step, by directly using information about action potentials' waveform shapes in the decoder, though this approach is not yet widespread. Particularly, one recent approach involves computing the moments of waveform features and using these moment values as inputs to decoders. This computationally inexpensive approach was shown to be comparable in accuracy to traditional spike sorting. In this study, we use offline data recorded from two Rhesus monkeys to further validate this approach. We also modify this approach by using sums of exponentiated features of spikes, rather than moments. Our results show that using waveform feature sums facilitates significantly higher hand movement reconstruction accuracy than using waveform feature moments, though the magnitudes of differences are small. We find that using the sums of one simple feature, the spike amplitude, allows better offline decoding accuracy than traditional spike sorting by expert (correlation of 0.767, 0.785 vs. 0.744, 0.738, respectively, for two monkeys, average 16% reduction in mean-squared-error), as well as unsorted threshold crossings (0.746, 0.776; average 9% reduction in mean-squared-error). Our results suggest that the sums-of-features framework has potential as an alternative to both spike sorting and using unsorted threshold crossings, if developed further. Also, we present data comparing sorted vs. unsorted spike counts in terms of offline decoding accuracy. Traditional sorted spike counts do not include waveforms that do not match any template ("hash"), but threshold crossing counts do include this hash. On our data and in previous work, hash contributes to decoding accuracy. Thus, using the comparison between sorted spike counts and threshold crossing counts to evaluate the benefit of sorting is confounded by the presence of hash. We find that when the comparison is controlled for hash, performing sorting is better than not. These results offer a new perspective on the question of to sort or not to sort.

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A method for decoding the neurophysiological spike-response transform.

Publications

A method for decoding the neurophysiological spike-response transform.

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