Characterizing neural activities evoked by manual acupuncture through spiking irregularity measures

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.

RETRACTED: Spiking Correlation Analysis of Synchronous Spikes Evoked by Acupuncture Mechanical Stimulus

“…We adopted four common manipulations in the clinical treatment: (I) twirling reinforcing, (II) lifting-thrusting reinforcing, (III) twirling reducing, and (IV) lifting-thrusting reducing. The stimulus frequency was 100 times/min and the stimulus duration was T = 2.5 s (for specific experimental details refer to references Men et al, 2011 and Xue et al, 2013 ). We chose the spike trains of three neurons in 20 trials as the research object and created statistical analysis on the spike events.…”

Action potential threshold of wide dynamic range neurons in rat spinal dorsal horn evoked by manual acupuncture at ST36

“…Further, the urethane has been widely used in acupuncture experiments [54][55][56][57], and all of them have shown that the spinal reflex of urethane-anesthetized cats is well preserved. Our earlier acupuncture studies [19,[21][22][23][24][25] have also found a similar phenomenon. Thus, we believe that the effects of anesthesia on the recording of present study should be at most minor.…”

“…In our previous studies, we have used gamma-process model [21], delayed feedforward network model [22], complex network mapping [23] as well as some nonlinear analysis methods [19], such as, Lyapunov exponent, correlation dimension and LempelZiv complexity, to characterize the property of electric signals recorded in the neurons in spinal cord evoked by manual acupuncture. These investigations have not only revealed reliable information about the chaotic and random properties of acupuncture signals, but also offered a deep insight into neural processing underlying manual acupuncture.…”

Spike-frequency adaptation of neural electrical signals evoked by manual acupuncture

“…Several studies have explored the neural mechanism of manual acupuncture [1][2][3]. However, it is still unclear what exactly the acupuncture mechanism is and how acupuncture has effect on the neural system.…”