A contour based automatic method to classify local field potentials recorded from rat barrel cortex

Whisking is the natural way for the rodents to explore the environment. Using the Local Field Potentials (LFPs) recorded from the barrel columns of the rat somatosensory cortex (S1) is one of the ways to extract information about the signal processing pathway during tactile information processing. Studies have shown that intra-and trans-columnar microcircuits in the barrel cortex segregate and integrate information during this pathway activation. During each experiment many single sweeps (sometimes referred as raw traces) of signal are recorded as a result of underlying network activity and averaged to extract information from them. However, mostly these single sweeps are very different in their shapes and extracting the information provided by the shape is the most common way to decode the transmitted information about the network. In this work, we propose a method capable of classifying these single sweeps from an experiment based on their shapes. The shape specific information of the single sweeps provided by this method can be used in decoding the tactile information processing pathway with a higher precision.