Analysis of Spatiotemporal Structures in Cortex-Wide Dynamics

Abstract

Both synchronous and asynchronous phase analysis patterns have been identified in mice at different cell-specific layers of the iso-cortex. While a strong pipeline exists to understand these patterns on a functional level, there is little information about how this same brain activity might be seen structurally. On a biological level, there should be the same wave patterns shown through structural and functional methods. This paper attempts to confirm this assertion by utilizing the Wilson-Cowan equations to better understand the correlation between functional and structural data. These equations model excitatory and inhibitory neurons in the cortical layer through eigenvalues and eigenvectors computed from a mouse brain correlation matrix. By manipulating the parameters to change whether we have a stable or unstable balance of excitatory and inhibitory neurons, we can see if the same regional patterns found through functional data are present in the coupled equations.