title: Statistical analysis of sleep spindle occurrences.
abstract: Spindles - a hallmark of stage II sleep - are a transient oscillatory phenomenon in the EEG believed to reflect thalamocortical activity contributing to unresponsiveness during sleep. Currently spindles are often classified into two classes: fast spindles, with a frequency of around 14 Hz, occurring in the centro-parietal region; and slow spindles, with a frequency of around 12 Hz, prevalent in the frontal region. Here we aim to establish whether the spindle generation process also exhibits spatial heterogeneity. Electroencephalographic recordings from 20 subjects were automatically scanned to detect spindles and the time occurrences of spindles were used for statistical analysis. Gamma distribution parameters were fit to each inter-spindle interval distribution, and a modified Wald-Wolfowitz lag-1 correlation test was applied. Results indicate that not all spindles are generated by the same statistical process, but this dissociation is not spindle-type specific. Although this dissociation is not topographically specific, a single generator for all spindle types appears unlikely.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation, School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. D.Panas@sms.ed.ac.uk
authors.forename: Dagmara
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Panas
authors.forename: Urszula
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Malinowska
authors.forename: Tadeusz
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Piotrowski
authors.forename: Jarosław
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Żygierewicz
authors.forename: Piotr
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Suffczyński
mesh_terms: D001931:Brain Mapping; D004569:Electroencephalography / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D010296:Parietal Lobe / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology*; D012894:Sleep Stages / Q000502:physiology*
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