Semisupervised definition of hippocampal ripples

Abstract Hippocampal ripples are transient neuronal features observed in high-frequency oscillatory bands of local field potentials, and they occur primarily during periods of behavioral immobility and slow-wave sleep. Ripples have been defined based on mathematically engineered features, such as magnitudes, durations, and cycles per event. However, the “ripples” could vary from laboratory to laboratory because their definition is subject to human bias, including the arbitrary choice of parameters and thresholds. In addition, local field potentials are often influenced by myoelectric noise arising from animal movement, making it difficult to distinguish ripples from high-frequency noises. To overcome these problems, we extracted ripple candidates under few constraints and labeled them as binary or stochastic “true” or “false” ripples using Gaussian mixed model clustering and a deep convolutional neural network in a weakly supervised fashion. Our automatic method separated ripples and myoelectric noise and was able to detect ripples even when the animals were moving. Moreover, we confirmed that a convolutional neural network was able to detect ripples defined by our method. Leave-one-animal-out cross-validation estimated the area under the precision-recall curve for ripple detection to be 0.72. Finally, our model establishes an appropriate threshold for the ripple magnitude in the case of the conventional detection of ripples.