Cluster Analysis of the Rat Olfactory Bulb Activity in Response to Different Odorants

With the goal of deepen in the understanding of coding of chemical information in the olfactory system, a large data set consisting of rat’s olfactory bulb activity values in response to several different volatile compounds has been analyzed by fuzzy c-means clustering methods. Clustering should help to discover groups of glomeruli that are similary activated according to their response profiles across the odorants. To investigate the significance of the achieved fuzzy partitions we developed and applied a novel validity approach based on cluster stability. Our results show certain level of glomerular clustering in the olfactory bulb and indicate that exist a main chemo-topic subdivision of the glomerular layer in few macro-area which are rather specific to particular functional groups of the volatile