Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 12 (NIPS 1999)
Holger Schoner, Martin Stetter, Ingo Schießl, John Mayhew, Jennifer Lund, Niall McLoughlin, Klaus Obermayer
In the analysis of data recorded by optical imaging from intrinsic signals (measurement of changes of light reflectance from cortical tissue) the re(cid:173) moval of noise and artifacts such as blood vessel patterns is a serious problem. Often bandpass filtering is used, but the underlying assumption that a spatial frequency exists, which separates the mapping component from other components (especially the global signal), is questionable. Here we propose alternative ways of processing optical imaging data, us(cid:173) ing blind source separation techniques based on the spatial decorre1ation of the data. We first perform benchmarks on artificial data in order to select the way of processing, which is most robust with respect to sen(cid:173) sor noise. We then apply it to recordings of optical imaging experiments from macaque primary visual cortex. We show that our BSS technique is able to extract ocular dominance and orientation preference maps from single condition stacks, for data, where standard post-processing pro(cid:173) cedures fail. Artifacts, especially blood vessel patterns, can often be completely removed from the maps. In summary, our method for blind source separation using extended spatial decorrelation is a superior tech(cid:173) nique for the analysis of optical recording data.