Characterizing neural activities evoked by manual acupuncture through spiking irregularity measures

doi:10.1088/1674-1056/22/9/098703

Abstract The neural system characterizes information in external stimulations by different spiking patterns. In order to examine how neural spiking patterns are related to acupuncture manipulations, experiments are designed in such a way that different types of manual acupuncture (MA) manipulations are taken at the ‘Zusanli’ point of experimental rats, and the induced electrical signals in the spinal dorsal root ganglion are detected and recorded. The interspike interval (ISI) statistical histogram is fitted by the gamma distribution, which has two parameters: one is the time-dependent firing rate and the other is a shape parameter characterizing the spiking irregularities. The shape parameter is the measure of spiking irregularities and can be used to identify the type of MA manipulations. The coefficient of variation is mostly used to measure the spike time irregularity, but it overestimates the irregularity in the case of pronounced firing rate changes. However, experiments show that each acupuncture manipulation will lead to changes in the firing rate. So we combine four relatively rate-independent measures to study the irregularity of spike trains evoked by different types of MA manipulations. Results suggest that the MA manipulations possess unique spiking statistics and characteristics and can be distinguished according to the spiking irregularity measures. These studies have offered new insights into the coding processes and information transfer of acupuncture.

Keywords: acupuncture interspike interval gamma distribution spiking irregularity measure

Received: 19 February 2013
Revised: 22 March 2013
Accepted manuscript online:

PACS:	87.19.ls	(Encoding, decoding, and transformation)
	87.19.lt	(Sensory systems: visual, auditory, tactile, taste, and olfaction)
	87.85.Ng	(Biological signal processing)

Fund: Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61072012 and 61172009), the Young Scientists Fund of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61104032), and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2012M510750).

Corresponding Authors: Wang Jiang
E-mail: jiangwang@tju.edu.cn

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Xue Ming (薛明), Wang Jiang (王江), Deng Bin (邓斌), Wei Xi-Le (魏熙乐), Yu Hai-Tao (于海涛), Chen Ying-Yuan (陈颖源) Characterizing neural activities evoked by manual acupuncture through spiking irregularity measures 2013 Chin. Phys. B 22 098703

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