Besides single neuron bursting, population-wide synchronous activities are also of interest. For example, repetition of activation patterns (Abeles and Gerstein, 1988; Sun et al., 2010) can be considered as memory traces, replayed by the appearance of a similar stimulus or due to internal processes that occur, e.g., during sleep (O'Neill et al., 2008; Abel et al., 2013). Bakkum et al. (2014) investigated parameters for and compared the performance of various burst detectors on population-wide bursts. An inter-spike interval (ISI) based network burst detector was able to identify small and large bursts better than other techniques in cultured networks. Rate-based detectors detected larger bursts only, while prematurely identifying the end of bursts. See Kreuz (2013) for further details and methods on quantifying synchronization.
