Title
Unsupervised Detection of Cell-Assembly Sequences by Similarity-Based Clustering.
Abstract
Neurons which fire in a fixed temporal pattern (i.e., "cell assemblies") are hypothesized to be a fundamental unit of neural information processing. Several methods are available for the detection of cell assemblies without a time structure. However, the systematic detection of cell assemblies with time structure has been challenging, especially in large datasets, due to the lack of efficient methods for handling the time structure. Here, we show a method to detect a variety of cell-assembly activity patterns, recurring in noisy neural population activities at multiple timescales. The key innovation is the use of a computer science method to comparing strings ("edit similarity"), to group spikes into assemblies. We validated the method using artificial data and experimental data, which were previously recorded from the hippocampus of male Long-Evans rats and the prefrontal cortex of male Brown Norway/Fisher hybrid rats. From the hippocampus, we could simultaneously extract place-cell sequences occurring on different timescales during navigation and awake replay. From the prefrontal cortex, we could discover multiple spike sequences of neurons encoding different segments of a goal-directed task. Unlike conventional event-driven statistical approaches, our method detects cell assemblies without creating event-locked averages. Thus, the method offers a novel analytical tool for deciphering the neural code during arbitrary behavioral and mental processes.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.3389/fninf.2019.00039
FRONTIERS IN NEUROINFORMATICS
Keywords
Field
DocType
neural ensemble,neural code,behavioral information,multi-neuron recordings,data mining,place cells,prefrontal neurons
Data mining,Population,Information processing,Pattern recognition,Neural coding,Computer science,Neural ensemble,Prefrontal cortex,Artificial intelligence,Cluster analysis,Hippocampus,Encoding (memory)
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
13
1662-5196
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
keita watanabe1125.62
Tatsuya Haga200.68
Masami Tatsuno3165.43
David R. Euston400.34
Tomoki Fukai538267.12