Antti Valjakka | PubMed Health

PubMed2007

The reflection of retinal light response information onto the superior colliculus in the rat.

BACKGROUND: The functional principles of mediation of retina-encoded visual information through the optic nerve to the superior colliculus (SC) of the contralateral brain hemisphere were investigated in non-drugged and unrestrained albino rats by considering the following issues: (1) the type of information transmitted, (2) the response components of the retina and SC involved in encoding the transmitted information, and (3) the timing of related processes. METHODS: The field potential responses for different intensities of flashes, under different background illuminations, were simultaneously recorded from the sclera area of the eye and the optic layer of the contralateral SC. RESULTS: It was found that the b-wave crest of the retinal electroretinogram (ERG) and the peak-1 or peak-2 of the SC correlate by their amplitude, while the a-wave trough of the retinal ERG and the peak-1 of the SC correlate by their latency. The values of these mutually correlating response components were invariably determined by the given light response bias of the retina (photoreceptors), the change in the photon flux of the light stimulus and, obviously, the change in the wavelength of the light stimulus. The a-wave trough, peak-1, b-wave crest and peak-2 were invariably induced in this time-order. CONCLUSIONS: The data suggest that the information properties of (a) intensity, (b) presentation time and, obviously, (c) colour of the light stimulus, such as are shed on the retina, and information about the light response bias of the retina are mediated correlatively and quantitatively to the cell network system of the SC through the optic nerve. These processes must happen during the a-to-b-wave phases of the ERG. The data indicate that the random-type variations in the activity of the related cellular systems may actually be harnessed in mediating the defined information properties of the visual stimulus from the retina to the SC of the brain through the optic nerve. This study shows a method of measuring the function of the optic nerve.

Animals↗

PubMed2002

EEG noise cancellation by a subspace method based on wavelet decomposition.

BACKGROUND: Noise reduction techniques play an essential role in EEG signal processing applications. A variety of methods are currently in use, including those based on linear filtering and adaptive noise cancellation, as well as subspace-based methods using singular value decomposition (SVD). SVD offers a robust method to decompose the data matrix into signal and noise subspaces. However, the SVD algorithm is characterized by high computational complexity, which restricts its use in real time EEG signal analysis. MATERIAL/METHODS: In this work we applied a wavelet transform to decompose the EEG signal into parallel subsignals. Noise was cancelled using the SVD-based method for each subsignal, and the noiseless EEG was reconstructed by using an inverse wavelet transform. EEGs were recorded in freely behaving rats from two different sites of the brain: 1). the hilar region of the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, 2). the frontal cortex, with the electrode tip located in the vicinity of the epipial neocortical surface. RESULTS: Our noise suppression method had the most obvious effect on the EEG frequency spectrum, where random noise was considerably diminished. In the time domain, the reconstructed waveform closely resembled the original EEG signal, but it could clearly be seen that most of the transient spikes had been removed. CONCLUSIONS: The present method offers remarkable computational savings and is especially well adapted for the analysis of highly dynamic EEGs.

Algorithms↗