Spatio-temporal architecture of orientational functional clusters in cat's primary visual cortex L Wang, Z Dai |
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School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technolo, China
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| Intrinsic optical imaging technique provides us a micro-level window to study the nature of neural mechanism from neural cluster's activities. But how to acquire useful neural activities from low signal-to-noise (SNR) intrinsic optical images has always been a difficult problem. Traditionally, using global mean on many repeats or by overlapping similar images, the low SNR can be improved to a certain extent. For example, according to "180 degree similar and 90 degree reverse" principal, the famous orientational "pinwheel" graph can be computed. However, in practice, this principal is difficult to be satisfied due to very low SNR. In our work, adopting PCA and spatial ICA, we acquired high-quality orientational functional map from original low SNR optical images. It is worth mentioning that our method can be carried out from few repeats and no need of "similar or reverse" principal. Further, some micro-architectures in cluster in the functional map were discussed. Moreover, the related temporal courses of the functional clusters were also studied to observe the change of neural activities to dynamic visual stimuli. We deem that combing spatial architecture and its temporal course is more meaningful to understand the biological visual neural mechanism. |
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