Markovian Analysis of the Sequential Behavior of the Spontaneous Spinal Cord Dorsum Potentials Induced by Acute Nociceptive Stimulation in the Anesthetized Cat.

In a previous study we developed a Machine Learning procedure for the automatic identification and classification of spontaneous cord dorsum potentials (). This study further supported the proposal that in the anesthetized cat, the spontaneous recorded from different lumbar spinal segments are generated by a distributed network of dorsal horn neurons with structured (non-random) patterns of functional connectivity and that these configurations can be changed to other non-random and stable configurations after the noceptive stimulation produced by the intradermic injection of capsaicin in the anesthetized cat. Here we present a study showing that the sequence of identified forms of the spontaneous follows a Markov chain of at least order one.