De-correlating the Spatio-temporal Signals of Multi-field Cortical Activation Patterns Recorded by Voltage Sensitive Dye Imaging

Modern brain imaging techniques like voltage sensitive dye recording get highly resolved complex spatio-temporal datasets. For temporal classification of these complex 2D + t datasets we applied several statistical analysis approaches like principal component analysis and cluster analysis. These methods proved to be very helpful to characterise the cortical response patterns into known and unknown sub-regions. Whereas the cluster analysis showed the already known regions are parcellated even further, the principal component analysis and the statistical description of the time-course revealed as the main result a temporal order of the activation sequence of the different fields.