Spatiotemporal dynamics of noisy excitable systems: Application to cultured human glial cell networks

Cooperative dynamics of excitable systems are very important for the understanding of many natural phenomena, including perturbation propagation in the nervous system.; Two theoretical systems (one subexcitable and one hyperexcitable) are studied by computational methods. It is shown that the length of perturbation propagation in the subexcitable system is maximized by spatiotemporal noise of optimal intensity. New measures are introduced to describe the synchronization of hyperexcitable systems, both for phase-attractive and phase repulsive coupling. The theoretical results are finally applied to experimental data, quantitatively showing that epileptic and normal astrocyte cultures are different from each other.; The results and measures that are introduced could be widely applied in any natural system of excitable elements or oscillators.