A method for reconstructing patterns of somatosensory cerebral cortical activity

An interactive graphics package was developed in order to acquire, display, and manipulate images of cerebral cortical autoradiographic data. The primary purpose for development of the system was to reconstruct accurate 2-dimensional maps of the functional activity within the somatosensory cerebral cortex. A Datacube Q-bus graphics module (QVG/QAF-123) was interfaced with the Micro PDP-11/23 to accept a standard RS170 video input signal, and autoradiographs of serial sections (each 20 microns thick) of a cerebral cortex were digitized individually to 768 X 512 X 8 bit resolution. Input look-up tables were used to standardize the autoradiographic data. Boundaries of the somatosensory cortex were entered (with a Summagraphics MM 1201 digitizer), and the image data was stored on disk file (a method of data compression was devised). A method for segmenting the image data for many (sequential) sections was developed that provided arrays from which the maps were generated. Thresholding, histogram equalization, edge detection and edge enhancement, and filters in both the spatial and frequency domains were employed to process the images of the maps. Plots of optical density values along any axis of the maps and gray level histograms of any map region could also be generated. Maps made by the described method are much higher in resolution than those produced by traditional (manual) methods, and permit analysis of the reconstructions in both the frequency and spatial domains.