Washington : A newly-developed mathematical method can detect geometric structure in neural activity in the brain, scientists say, reports PTI.
“Previously, in order to understand this structure, scientists needed to relate neural activity to some specific external stimulus,” said Vladimir Itskov, associate professor of mathematics at Penn State University in US.
“Our method is the first to be able to reveal this structure without our knowing an external stimulus ahead of time. We”ve now shown that our new method will allow us to explore the organisational structure of neurons without knowing their function in advance,” said Itskov.
“The traditional methods used by researchers to analyse the relationship between the activities of neurons were adopted from physics,” said Carina Curto, associate professor of mathematics at Penn State.
“But neuroscience data doesn”t necessarily play by the same rules as data from physics, so we need new tools. Our method is a first step toward developing a new mathematical toolkit to uncover the structure of オンライン カジノ neural circuits with unknown function in the brain,” Curto said.
The method – clique topology – was developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Penn State, the University of Pennsylvania, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
“We have adopted approaches from the field of algebraic topology that previously had been used primarily in the domain of pure mathematics and have applied them to experimental data on the activity of place cells – specialised neurons in the part of the brain called the hippocampus that sense the position of an animal in its environment,” said Curto.
The researchers measured the activity of place cells in the brains of rats during three different experimental conditions. They then analysed the pairwise correlations of this activity – how the firing of each neuron was related to the firing of every other neuron.
In the first condition, the rats were allowed to roam freely in their environment – a behaviour where the activity of place cells is directly related to the location of the animal in its environment.
