Directional cross-correlation analysis of neuronal burst firing

Elucidates the characteristics of the directional cross-correlation method for analyzing point process data, and applies it to the analysis of synchronous neuronal spike trains. As a result of analyzing some example data, we discovered that a spike of one neuron was remarkably synchronized with the last spike of a burst generated by another neuron. Since a directional cross-correlation coefficient indicates the probability of encountering any spike of a neuron as a function of time before or after a spike of another neuron, it is not affected by the firing rate difference between these neurons. We conclude that this method is efficient for detecting synchronous firing between neurons having different firing rates