Abstract
Optical imaging techniques are nowadays highly popular in neuroscience research, due to their high spatial and temporal resolution. Optical recordings data are coming in the form of sequential snapshots (i.e. videos) reflecting changes in neural activity. By adopting carefully designed stimulation paradigms, these signals constitute an invaluable source of information regarding the emerging spatiotemporal dynamics of brain’s response. However, the volume of collected data can obscure the understanding of underlying mechanisms. In particular, the comparison between different recording conditions is a challenging task that is usually solved empirically.
We introduce an algorithmic technique that identifies spatial domains of coherent evoked activity, produces a meaningful summary of the involved videos and facilitates the comparison of response dynamics. A self-organizing network (SON) lies in the core of the methodology and is responsible for the segmentation of imaged areas into disjoint, functional homogeneous regions. The obtained segments are then ordered according to the strength of response and the ones below an adaptively defined threshold are suppressed. In this way, regions of interest (ROIs) are defined automatically for each response individually and can subsequently be compared across-responses revealing the spatial aspects of neural code that usually give rise to functional maps.
Our technique is demonstrated using averaged responses from rat S1 somatosensory cortex. For the first time, some evidence is provided that the deflection direction of a single whisker might be reflected in the location of activation’s first entry.
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© 2010 International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering
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Tsitlakidis, V., Laskaris, N.A., Koudounis, G.C., Kosmidis, E.K. (2010). An efficient Video-Synopsis technique for optical recordings with application to the analysis of rat barrel-cortex responses. In: Bamidis, P.D., Pallikarakis, N. (eds) XII Mediterranean Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing 2010. IFMBE Proceedings, vol 29. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13039-7_84
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13039-7_84
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-13038-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-13039-7
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