The functional structure of cortical neuronal networks grown in vitro

Abstract

We apply an information theoretic treatment of action potential time series measured with microelectrode arrays to estimate the connectivity of mammalian neuronal cell assemblies grown {\it in vitro}. We infer connectivity between two neurons via the measurement of the mutual information between their spike trains. In addition we measure higher point multi-informations between any two spike trains conditional on the activity of a third cell, as a means to identify and distinguish classes of functional connectivity among three neurons. The use of a conditional three-cell measure removes some interpretational shortcomings of the pairwise mutual information and sheds light into the functional connectivity arrangements of any three cells. We analyze the resultant connectivity graphs in light of other complex networks and demonstrate that, despite their {\it ex vivo} development, the connectivity maps derived from cultured neural assemblies are similar to other biological networks and display nontrivial structure in clustering coefficient, network diameter and assortative mixing. Specifically we show that these networks are weakly disassortative small world graphs, which differ significantly in their structure from randomized graphs with the same degree. We expect our analysis to be useful in identifying the computational motifs of a wide variety of complex networks, derived from time series data.

12 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (2)

• ARACNE: An Algorithm for the Reconstruction of Gene Regulatory Networks in a Mammalian Cellular Context
• Scale-free brain functional networks

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Exploration of synergistic and redundant information sharing in static and dynamical Gaussian systems
• Identification of functional information subgraphs in complex networks
• Revealing directed effective connectivity of cortical neuronal networks from measurements
• Emerging Frontiers of Neuroengineering: A Network Science of Brain Connectivity
• Cooperative searching for stochastic targets
• Spontaneous coordinated activity in cultured networks: Analysis of multiple ignition sites, primary circuits, burst phase delay distributions and functional structures
• Effects of Hebbian learning on the dynamics and structure of random networks with inhibitory and excitatory neurons