Monday, October 6, 2014

Fractal noises and motions in time series of presympathetic and sympathetic neural activities.

J Neurophysiol. 2006 Feb;95(2):1176-84. Epub 2005 Nov 23.
Gebber GL, Orer HS, Barman SM.

So I read this paper, but I think I’m going to have to read it a few more times with a lot of different highlighters if I’m really going to understand it. I understand that they were trying to analyze rhythmic activity among LTF and RVLM neurons in cats that correlates with SNA. This is not easy since not every action potential correlates with bursts in SNA, and a neuron will often NOT fire in a lot of places where a simple rhythm would dictate that it should fire. However, using spike-triggered averaging, they analyzed the interspike intervals of neurons to see how they would correlate with cardiac SNA. They showed that even though some neurons might miss more than 10 bursts before firing a second action potential, they still were able to construct histograms that showed how the action potentials correlated with SNA, and what phase of the cardiac cycle and SNA burst the neuron was most likely to fire at. After that, the paper kind of got away from me. Although this is the exact kind of stuff we’re trying to get in to, so I’ll be reading this a little more closely and brushing up on my math skills so that I can understand all of this a little better. -DH

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