Calculation of the conduction velocity of short nerve fibres

The conduction velocity v of a nerve fibre is calculated from the time delay Δ of a propagating action potential between two recording sites along the fibre. However, the conventional method of determining Δ cannot be applied to short nerve fibres. Therefore several linear signal analysis methods for the estimation of Δ have been compared with regard to the reproducibility of their results obtained from pairs of simultaneously recorded action potentials at several small inter-electrode distances. It was found that, estimating Δ from the cross-correlogram and as a second one a variant of this method (maximum likelihood time delay estimation) give the most reliable values of v in short nerve fibres.