Physical limits to spatial resolution of optical recording: clarifying the spatial structure of cortical hypercolumns.

ABSTRACT: Neurons in macaque primary visual cortex are spatially arranged by their global topographic position and in at least three overlapping local modular systems: ocular dominance columns, orientation pinwheels, and cytochrome oxidase (CO) blobs. Individual neurons in the blobs are not tuned to orientation, and populations of neurons in the pinwheel center regions show weak orientation tuning, suggesting a close relation between pinwheel centers and CO blobs. However, this hypothesis has been challenged by a series of optical recording experiments. In this report, we show that the statistical error associated with photon scatter and absorption in brain tissue combined with the blurring introduced by the optics of the imaging system has typically been in the range of 250 microm. These physical l

SUBMITTER: Polimeni JR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC554808 | biostudies-literature | 2005 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature