Synchrony measure for a neuron driven by excitatory and inhibitory inputs and its adaptation to experimentally-recorded data

Abstract

The aim of the current work is twofold: firstly to adapt an existing method measuring the input synchrony of a neuron driven only by excitatory inputs in such a way so as to account for inhibitory inputs as well and secondly to further appropriately adapt this measure so as to be correctly utilised on experimentally-recorded data. The existing method uses the normalized pre-spike slope (NPSS) of the membrane potential, resulting from observing the slope of depolarization of the membrane potential of a neuron prior to the moment of crossing the threshold within a short period of time, to identify the response-relevant input synchrony and through it to infer the operational mode of a neuron. The first adaptation of NPSS is made such that its upper bound calculation accommodates for the higher possible slope values caused by the lower average and minimum membrane potential values due to inhibitory inputs. Results indicate that when the input spike trains arrive randomly, the modified NPSS works as expected inferring that the neuron is operating as a temporal integrator. When the input spike trains arrive in perfect synchrony though, the modified NPSS works as expected only when the level of inhibition is much higher than the level of excitation. This suggests that calculation of the upper bound of the NPSS should be a function of the ratio between excitatory and inhibitory inputs in order to be able to correctly capture perfect synchrony at a neuron's input. In addition, we effectively demonstrate a process which has to be followed when aiming to use the NPSS on real neuron recordings. This process, which relies on empirical observations of the slope of depolarisation for estimating the bounds for the range of observed interspike interval lengths, is successfully applied to experimentally-recorded data showing that through it both a real neuron's operational mode and the amount of input synchrony that caused its firing can be inferred. © 2017 Elsevier B.V.