A method to measure the strength of multi-unit bursts of action potentials

Both the numbers of neurons that are active during multi-unit bursts of spikes and the frequencies with which individual neurons fire in these bursts can vary in response to changes in excitation. Here is a digital-filtering method that measures the strength of a burst of spikes by calculating the area of a polygon derived from the squared voltages that record the burst, and dividing this area by the burst's duration. The method was developed in the SigmaPlot environment, and makes use of the Fast-Fourier Transform functions provided in the SigmaPlot transform language. To test the method's performance, I constructed multi-unit bursts of spikes with known structure and calculated the strengths of these known bursts. To demonstrate the method's usefulness, I applied it to a train of 23 bursts of spikes in motor axons recorded during a spontaneous bout of patterned motor output. The measured strengths of these bursts varied 30-fold, and were well-correlated with the differences in the original recording. The results demonstrate that the method effectively measures burst strength independent of burst duration.