1471-2202-12-S1-P333 1471-2202 Poster presentation <p>Finding the event structure of neuronal spike trains</p> Toups J Vincent Fellous Jean-Marc Thomas J Peter Sejnowski J Terrence Tiesinga H Paul p.tiesinga@science.ru.nl

Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA

Psychology Department, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA

Departments of Mathematics, Biology and Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA

Department of Neuroscience, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH 44074, USA

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, The Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA

Division of Biological Sciences, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA

Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, 6525 AJ, The Netherlands

 BMC Neuroscience <p>Twentieth Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting: CNS*2011</p> Jean-Marc Fellous and Astrid Prinz Publication of this supplement has been supported by Neuralynx, Springer, INCF and the Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience Meeting abstracts - A single PDF containing all abstracts in this supplement is available here. http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-2202-12-S1-info.pdf <p>Twentieth Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting: CNS*2011</p> Stockholm, Sweden 23-28 July 2011 http://www.cnsorg.org/2011/ 1471-2202 2011 12 Suppl 1 P333 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/12/S1/P333 10.1186/1471-2202-12-S1-P333 18 7 2011 2011 Toups et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Neurons in sensory systems convey information about physical stimuli in their spike trains. In vitro, single neurons respond precisely and reliably to the repeated injection of the same fluctuating current, producing regions of elevated firing rate, termed events. Analysis of these spike trains reveals that multiple distinct spike patterns can be identified as trial-to-trial correlations between spike times 1. Finding events in data with realistic spiking statistics is challenging because events belonging to different spike patterns may overlap. We propose a method for finding spiking events that uses contextual information to disambiguate which pattern a trial belongs to. The procedure can be applied to spike trains of the same neuron across multiple trials to detect and separate responses obtained during different brain states. The procedure can also be applied to spike trains from multiple simultaneously recorded neurons in order to identify volleys of near synchronous activity or to distinguish between excitatory and inhibitory neurons. The procedure was tested using artificial data as well as recordings in vitro in response to fluctuating current waveforms.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health (R01-MH68481); the Human Frontier Science Program (JVT & PHT); the National Science Foundation (DMS-0720142) (PJT), and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (TJS). PJT acknowledges research support from the Oberlin College Library.

 <p>Discovering Spike Patterns in Neuronal Responses</p> Fellous JM Tiesinga PHE Thomas PJ Sejnowski TJ Journal of Neurosci 2004 24 2989 3001 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4649-03.2004