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On the role of the entorhinal cortex in the effective connectivity of the hippocampal formation

López-Madrona, V.; Matias,F.; Pereda, E.; Canals, S.; Mirasso, C.
Chaos 27, 047401 (2017)

Find a relation between structural and functional brain connectivity is one of the major goals of neuroscientists. In order to tackle this issue two questions can be addressed: How do anatomical connections among brain regions influence the information flow in the brain network? And, how to determine the structural connectivity from the effective connectivity (or, more precisely, from causal measurements)? In this work we model the hippocampal formation assuming three main areas (CA1, CA3 and the dentate gyrus) and the enthorrinal cortex (EC), with the aim of exploring how the structural connectivity between EC layers influences the causal links among these three hippocampal regions. We apply two different statistical causality measurements to the simulated neurophysiological time series: Granger Causality (GC) and Partial Transfer Entropy (PTE). Our results reveal that the estimation of effective connectivity in the hippocampus strongly depends on the connectivity among EC layers. We also find that GC and PTE may yield very different results for certain configurations among the layers of the EC. In addition, we show that based on GC and PTE measurements it is not possible to differentiate between excitatory and inhibitory inter-areal connections.