Decoding acupuncture electrical signals in spinal dorsal root ganglion

Action potential threshold of wide dynamic range neurons in rat spinal dorsal horn evoked by manual acupuncture at ST36

“…Further, the urethane has been widely used in acupuncture experiments [54][55][56][57], and all of them have shown that the spinal reflex of urethane-anesthetized cats is well preserved. Our earlier acupuncture studies [19,[21][22][23][24][25] have also found a similar phenomenon. Thus, we believe that the effects of anesthesia on the recording of present study should be at most minor.…”

“…These investigations have not only revealed reliable information about the chaotic and random properties of acupuncture signals, but also offered a deep insight into neural processing underlying manual acupuncture. Further, we have also adopted Bayesian decoding algorithm [24] and generalized linear model [25] to decode acupuncture-evoked electric signals. Despite so many studies, there is a lack of investigations on how individual action potential is initiated in these neurons during acupuncture at ST36, which leaves important questions unanswered.…”

Fractal characterization of acupuncture-induced spike trains of rat WDR neurons

“…Some previous studies had found the fractal activities in spinal dorsal horn neurons evoked by external stimulation [16,17,27]. We also have found MAinduced neuronal activities [8,9] may represent a special type of spatiotemporal encoding [12]. These studies implied that fractal analysis may help to reveal the encoding mechanism of acupuncture.…”

“…Firstly, spike-sorting algorithms [11,12] were used offline to detect the spikes from the original data. Then, the ISI series and their statistical properties, including mean, standard deviation (SD), coefficient of variation (CV) and distribution, were constructed, respectively.…”

“…In our previous studies, the changes of complexity under MA were found in human EEG [7], in neuronal activities of rat spinal dorsal root ganglia [8] and rat spinal dorsal horn [9,10]. These showed us a spatiotemporal coding of acupuncture information [11,12]. Thus, characterization of the time-evolutionary neural activities in context of MA becomes more important to understand its coding mechanisms.…”