Qureshi F, Yan J. Three dimensional rendering of auditory neuronal responses: A novel illustration of receptive field across frequency, intensity & time domains.
J Neurosci Methods 2020;
338:108682. [PMID:
32165230 DOI:
10.1016/j.jneumeth.2020.108682]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/02/2019] [Revised: 03/07/2020] [Accepted: 03/08/2020] [Indexed: 10/24/2022]
Abstract
BACKGROUND
Neural coding of sound information is often studied through frequency tuning curve (FTC), spectro-temporal receptive field (STRF), post-stimulus time histogram (PSTH), and other methods such as rate functions. These methods, despite providing a robust characterization of auditory responses in their specific domains, lack a complete description in terms of three sound fundamentals: frequency, amplitude, and time.
NEW METHOD
Using the techniques of electrophysiology, neural signal processing and medical image processing, a standalone method is created to illustrate the neural processing of three sound fundamentals in one representation.
RESULTS
The new method comprehensively showed frequency tuning, intensity tuning, time tuning as well as a novel representation of frequency and time dependent intensity coding. It provides most of the necessary parameters that are used to quantify neural response properties, such as minimum threshold (MT), frequency tuning, latency, best frequency (BF), characteristic frequency (CF), bandwidth (BW), etc. COMPARISON WITH EXISTING METHODS: Our method shows neural responses as a function of all three sound fundamentals in a single representation that was not possible in previous methods. It covers many functions of conventional methods and allow extracting novel information such as the intensity coding as the function of the spectrotemporal response area of auditory neurons.
CONCLUSION
This method can be used as a standalone package to study auditory neural responses and evaluate the performance of different hearing related devices such as cochlear implants and hearing aids in animal models as well as study and compare auditory processing in aged and hearing impaired animal models.
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