Structural characterization of oscillations in brain networks with rate dynamics (Q2097827)

The authors analyze oscillations associated to brain pattern activity which are known to be yet far from being well understood. They present several structural representations of neural networks oscillatory behavior analyzed using the concept of linear-threshold dynamics. Their goal is to characterize the relationship between network structure and the oscillatory behavior observed in linear-threshold dynamics modeling brain networks. They get necessary and/or sufficient conditions regarding the network structure and external inputs by using the switched-affine nature of the network dynamics. The following types of networks are analyzed: two-dimensional excitatory-inhibitory, one inhibitory and arbitrary number of excitatory nodes, entirely inhibitory with arbitrary number of nodes, and networks of excitatory-inhibitory pairs. Considering the arbitrary dimensionality of the analyzed systems, the authors count up on the lack of stable equilibria as system-based proxy for oscillation existence confirmed by extensive numerical experiments. Thus, the main contributions consist of proving necessary and/or sufficient conditions on the structure of linear-threshold networks for lack of stable equilibria.