Global Synchronization Measurement of Multivariate Neural Signals with Massively Parallel Nonlinear Interdependence Analysis

The estimation of synchronization amongst multiple brain regions is a critical issue in understanding brain functions. There is a lack of an appropriate approach which is capable of 1) measuring the direction and strength of synchronization of activities of multiple brain regions, and 2) adapting to the quickly increasing sizes and scales of neural signals. Nonlinear Interdependence (NLI) analysis is an effective method for measuring synchronization direction and strength of bivariate neural signal. However, the method currently does not directly apply in handling multivariate signal. Its application in practice has also long been largely hampered by the ultra-high complexity of NLI algorithms. Aiming at these problems, this study 1) extends the conventional NLI to quantify the global synchronization of multivariate neural signals, and 2) develops a parallelized NLI method with general-purpose computing on the graphics processing unit (GPGPU), namely, G-NLI. The approach performs synchronization measurement in a massively parallel manner. The G-NLI has improved the runtime performance by more than 1000 times comparing to the original sequential NLI. Meanwhile, the G-NLI was employed to analyze 10-channel local field potential (LFP) recordings from a patient suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy. The results demonstrate that the proposed G-NLI method can support real-time global synchronization measurement and it could be successful in localization of epileptic focus.