Measuring Synchronization between Spikes and Local Field Potential Based on the Kullback–Leibler Divergence

Neurophysiological studies have shown that there is a close relationship between spikes and local field potential (LFP), which reflects crucial neural coding information. In this paper, we used a new method to evaluate the synchronization between spikes and LFP. All possible phases of LFP from − π to π were first binned into a freely chosen number of bins; then, the probability of spikes falling in each bin was calculated, and the deviation degree from the uniform distribution based on the Kullback–Leibler divergence was calculated to define the synchronization between spikes and LFP. The simulation results demonstrate that the method is rapid, basically unaffected by the total number of spikes, and can adequately resist the noise of spike trains. We applied this method to the experimental data of patients with intractable epilepsy, and we observed the synchronization between spikes and LFP in the formation of memory. These results show that our proposed method is a powerful tool that can quantitatively measure the synchronization between spikes and LFP.