Introducing a Comprehensive Framework to Measure Spike-LFP Coupling

Measuring the coupling of single neuron's spiking activities to the local field potentials (LFPs) is a method to investigate neuronal synchronization. The most important synchronization measures are phase locking value (PLV), spike field coherence (SFC), pairwise phase consistency (PPC), and spike-triggered correlation matrix synchronization (SCMS). Synchronization is generally quantified using the PLV and SFC. PLV and SFC methods are either biased on the spike rates or the number of trials. To resolve these problems the PPC measure has been introduced. However, there are some shortcomings associated with the PPC measure which is unbiased only for very high spike rates. However evaluating spike-LFP phase coupling (SPC) for short trials or low number of spikes is a challenge in many studies. Lastly, SCMS measures the correlation in terms of phase in regions around the spikes inclusive of the non-spiking events which is the major difference between SCMS and SPC. This study proposes a new framework for predicting a more reliable SPC by modeling and introducing appropriate machine learning algorithms namely least squares, Lasso, and neural networks algorithms where through an initial trend of the spike rates, the ideal SPC is predicted for neurons with low spike rates. Furthermore, comparing the performance of these three algorithms shows that the least squares approach provided the best performance with a correlation of 0.99214 and R ² of 0.9563 in the training phase, and correlation of 0.95969 and R ² of 0.8842 in the test phase. Hence, the results show that the proposed framework significantly enhances the accuracy and provides a bias-free basis for small number of spikes for SPC as compared to the conventional methods such as PLV method. As such, it has the general ability to correct for the bias on the number of spike rates.