A scientific team comprising researchers from the Center for Biomedical Technology (CTB) at UPM, University of La Laguna (ULL) and Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex System (IFISC, CSIC-UIB) has developed a new method to detect temporal patterns which is based on a neuro-inspired system and is used to classify brain activity using magnetoencephalography. This methodology, which has been validated and applied to real data, could shed light on some mechanisms of information storage in the brain.

Humans perform many cognitive tasks remarkably well, including pattern recognition, although the neuronal mechanisms underlying this process are not well known. However, artificial neural networks inspired by brain circuits have been designed and used to tackle spatio-temporal pattern recognition tasks.

The research work carried out by researchers from the Laboratory of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience (LNCyC) at CTB, in collaboration with other institutions, is a pattern detection structure able to assess the parallel temporal sequences and, thanks to the mechanism of synaptic plasticity added to the model, it can also learn the distinctive features of different type of signal of interest.

The neuro-inspired structure is the multi-neuronal spike sequence detector (MNSD). The detector can be trained online using new examples. After learning from a certain number of examples, MNSD can learn temporal sequences belonging to a specific group and distinguish learned sequences from others.