Tracking times in temporal patterns embodied in intra-cortical data for controling neural prosthesis an animal simulation study

Abstract

Brain-machines capture brain signals in order to restore communication and movement to disabled people who suffer from brain palsy or motor disorders. In brain regions, the ensemble firing of populations of neurons represents spatio-temporal patterns that are transformed into outgoing spatio-temporal patterns which encode complex cognitive task. This transformation is dynamic, non-stationary (time-varying) and highly nonlinear. Hence, modeling such complex biological patterns requires specific model structures to uncover the underlying physiological mechanisms and their influences on system behavior. In this study, a recent multi-electrode technology allows the record of the simultaneous neuron activities in behaving animals. Intra-cortical data are processed according to these steps: spike detection and sorting, than desired action extraction from the rate of the obtained signal. We focus on the following important questions about (i) the possibility of linking the brain signal time events with some time-delayed mapping tools; (ii) the use of some suitable inputs than others for the decoder; (iii) a consideration of separated data or a special representation founded on multi-dimensional statistics. This paper concentrates mostly on the analysis of parallel spike train when certain critical hypotheses are ignored by the data for the working method. We have made efforts to define explicitly whether the underlying hypotheses are actually achieved. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to define the embedded memory order of NARX recurrent neural networks to the hand trajectory tracking process. We also demonstrate that this algorithm can improve performance on inference tasks.