Non-negative matrix factorization with sparseness constraints for neural activity in rat prefrontal cortex during working memory task / 国际生物医学工程杂志

Objective To analyze neural activity of in rat prefrontal cortex with the use of nonnegative matrix factorization with sparseness constrains (NMFs) as a methodology and to study how to express neural ensemble with higher precision during working memory task.Methods Experiment data were obtained from neural population activity in the period 5 s before and after the working memory event.From the zero point,the neuronal firing times were binned in windows of 200 ms with 50 ms overlapping.The normalized neuronal bin-count matrix is decomposed by NMFs into mixing matrix and source component matrix with sparseness constraints.Meaningful components were extracted to reconstruct the input by an inverse of NMFs transform.Results By analyzing the ten groups of data from 2 rats,with the numbers of the sparse sources of 10 and 15 respectively,explicit neural ensembles with the feature components were obtained in the sparse reconstructed activity.Comparing to rate coding,the spatiotemporal location of neural ensemble was more precisely detected.Conclusion The working memory information is encoded with neural ensemble activity.NMFs could find the sparse firing pattern robustly in neuron population activity.NMFs removes much redundancy and demonstrate the possibility to express neural ensemble with higher precision compared with rate coding,which would be helpful to infer correlations between cortical firing pattern and working memory event.

Study on coding working memory event via independent components energies of multichannel local field potentials / 国际生物医学工程杂志

Objective To investigate how the independent components(ICs)energies of multichannel local field potentials(LFPs) code event base on the analysis of ICA of the cortical LFPs of rats. Methods Taking the event point as the zero point, 15-channel LFPs between the span of ±500ms recorded from the prefrontal cortex of rats were decomposed into 15 ICs. The energies of the ICs were computed in a 50-ms window. By sliding the window with step of 25 ms, a dynamic distribution mapping of the 15 ICs' energies was established. ICs with distinctly increased energies during the span of ±200 ms, which indicating that these ICs energies coded event,were selected as the targets. The corresponding channels of these ICs were determined consequently via the inverse transformation of ICA. Results Considering each trail of the repetitious analysis for the same segment of data, the spatial localization of the dominate function region(s) turned out to be relatively stable in spite of the uncertainty of the number and sequence of the target IC(s) due to the ambiguities of the decomposition of ICA.Meanwhile, the analysis results of a series of data segments showed satisfactory correspondence between data segments and dominate function regions. Conclusion The ICs' energies of multichannel LFPs are able to code events in working memories; It is valid for ICA to identify the coding patterns of multichannel LFPs to events; ICA is capable to localize the dominate function regions of event coding with satisfactory robustness.