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Accurate establishment of the retinotopic topography of area 17 in cats by intrinsic signal optical imaging

Chen Xin, Shou Tiande

Center for Brain Science Research，School of Life Science，Fudan University. Shanghai 200433,China；Laboratory of Visual Information Processing, Institute of Biophyics，Chinese Academy of Sciences.Beijing 100101,China

Abstract

The retinotopic topography of area 17 in cats was measured by optical imaging based on intrin-sic signals. When stimulated with two neighboring gratings oriented orthogonally each other, which were po-sitioned respectively in the upper and lower visual fields, one piece of cortex that had the retinal projectioncorresponding to the area around the border of the two stimulus gratings became blurred in the resultantfunction orientation map, because the neurons in this site received excitatory signals from both the horizontaland the vertical gratings via indirect ways. This functional map of the same cortex was compared with that e-licited only by a horizontal or vertical grating stimulation in the whole visual field. Accordingly , the accu-rate position of the retinotopic eccentricity of the cortex in visual field can be demarcated by calculating thecross correlation coefficient of the two functional maps. Furthermore, compared with the electrophysiologicalmeasure of receptive fields of single cortical neurons,the retinotopic eccentricities revealed by optical imaging were identical. This experiment provides a fast and relatively accurate method to calculate the retinotopic eccentricities in a large cortical area of the visual cortex.

Key words: Retinotopic eccentricity;Cross correlation coefficient;Area 17;Cat;Optical imaging

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Citing This Article：

Chen Xin, Shou Tiande. Accurate establishment of the retinotopic topography of area 17 in cats by intrinsic signal optical imaging. Acta Physiol Sin 2003; 55 (5): (in Chinese with English abstract).