Temporal pattern recognition using spiking neural networks for cortical neuronal spike train decoding

Abstract

Most experimental and decoding algorithm studies of brain neural signals assume that neurons transmit information as a rate coding, but recent studies on the fast cortical computations indicate that temporal coding is probably a more biologically plausible scheme used by neurons. We introduce spiking neural networks (SNN) which consist of spiking neurons propagate information by the timing of spikes to analyze the cortical neural spike trains directly without temporal information lost. The SNN based temporal pattern classification is compared with the conventional artificial neural networks (ANN) based firing rate analysis. The results show that the SNN algorithm can achieve higher accuracy, which demonstrates that temporal coding is a viable code for fast neural information processing and the SNN approach is suitable for recognizing the temporal pattern in the cortical neural signals.