No Arabic abstract
Retinal circuitry transforms spatiotemporal patterns of light into spiking activity of ganglion cells, which provide the sole visual input to the brain. Recent advances have led to a detailed characterization of retinal activity and stimulus encoding by large neural populations. The inverse problem of decoding, where the stimulus is reconstructed from spikes, has received less attention, in particular for complex input movies that should be reconstructed pixel-by-pixel. We recorded around a hundred neurons from a dense patch in a rat retina and decoded movies of multiple small discs executing mutually-avoiding random motions. We constructed nonlinear (kernelized) decoders that improved significantly over linear decoding results, mostly due to their ability to reliably separate between neural responses driven by locally fluctuating light signals, and responses at locally constant light driven by spontaneous or network activity. This improvement crucially depended on the precise, non-Poisson temporal structure of individual spike trains, which originated in the spike-history dependence of neural responses. Our results suggest a general paradigm in which downstream neural circuitry could discriminate between spontaneous and stimulus-driven activity on the basis of higher-order statistical structure intrinsic to the incoming spike trains.
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have shown promising results in restoring motor function to individuals with spinal cord injury. These systems have traditionally focused on the restoration of upper extremity function; however, the lower extremities have received relatively little attention. Early feasibility studies used noninvasive electroencephalogram (EEG)-based BCIs to restore walking function to people with paraplegia. However, the limited spatiotemporal resolution of EEG signals restricted the application of these BCIs to elementary gait tasks, such as the initiation and termination of walking. To restore more complex gait functions, BCIs must accurately decode additional degrees of freedom from brain signals. In this study, we used subdurally recorded electrocorticogram (ECoG) signals from able-bodied subjects to design a decoder capable of predicting the walking state and step rate information. We recorded ECoG signals from the motor cortices of two individuals as they walked on a treadmill at different speeds. Our offline analysis demonstrated that the state information could be decoded from >16 minutes of ECoG data with an unprecedented accuracy of 99.8%. Additionally, using a Bayesian filter approach, we achieved an average correlation coefficient between the decoded and true step rates of 0.934. When combined, these decoders may yield decoding accuracies sufficient to safely operate present-day walking prostheses.
We present a method to estimate Gibbs distributions with textit{spatio-temporal} constraints on spike trains statistics. We apply this method to spike trains recorded from ganglion cells of the salamander retina, in response to natural movies. Our analysis, restricted to a few neurons, performs more accurately than pairwise synchronization models (Ising) or the 1-time step Markov models (cite{marre-boustani-etal:09}) to describe the statistics of spatio-temporal spike patterns and emphasizes the role of higher order spatio-temporal interactions.
Local field potentials (LFPs) sampled with extracellular electrodes are frequently used as a measure of population neuronal activity. However, relating such measurements to underlying neuronal behaviour and connectivity is non-trivial. To help study this link, we developed the Virtual Electrode Recording Tool for EXtracellular potentials (VERTEX). We first identified a reduced neuron model that retained the spatial and frequency filtering characteristics of extracellular potentials from neocortical neurons. We then developed VERTEX as an easy-to-use Matlab tool for simulating LFPs from large populations (>100 000 neurons). A VERTEX-based simulation successfully reproduced features of the LFPs from an in vitro multi-electrode array recording of macaque neocortical tissue. Our model, with virtual electrodes placed anywhere in 3D, allows direct comparisons with the in vitro recording setup. We envisage that VERTEX will stimulate experimentalists, clinicians, and computational neuroscientists to use models to understand the mechanisms underlying measured brain dynamics in health and disease.
The receptive fields of simple cells in the visual cortex can be understood as linear filters. These filters can be modelled by Gabor functions, or by Gaussian derivatives. Gabor functions can also be combined in an `energy model of the complex cell response. This paper proposes an alternative model of the complex cell, based on Gaussian derivatives. It is most important to account for the insensitivity of the complex response to small shifts of the image. The new model uses a linear combination of the first few derivative filters, at a single position, to approximate the first derivative filter, at a series of adjacent positions. The maximum response, over all positions, gives a signal that is insensitive to small shifts of the image. This model, unlike previous approaches, is based on the scale space theory of visual processing. In particular, the complex cell is built from filters that respond to the twod differential structure of the image. The computational aspects of the new model are studied in one and two dimensions, using the steerability of the Gaussian derivatives. The response of the model to basic images, such as edges and gratings, is derived formally. The response to natural images is also evaluated, using statistical measures of shift insensitivity. The relevance of the new model to the cortical image representation is discussed.
Neural coding is a field of study that concerns how sensory information is represented in the brain by networks of neurons. The link between external stimulus and neural response can be studied from two parallel points of view. The first, neural encoding refers to the mapping from stimulus to response, and primarily focuses on understanding how neurons respond to a wide variety of stimuli, and on constructing models that accurately describe the stimulus-response relationship. Neural decoding, on the other hand, refers to the reverse mapping, from response to stimulus, where the challenge is to reconstruct a stimulus from the spikes it evokes. Since neuronal response is stochastic, a one-to-one mapping of stimuli into neural responses does not exist, causing a mismatch between the two viewpoints of neural coding. Here, we use these two perspectives to investigate the question of what rate coding is, in the simple setting of a single stationary stimulus parameter and a single stationary spike train represented by a renewal process. We show that when rate codes are defined in terms of encoding, i.e., the stimulus parameter is mapped onto the mean firing rate, the rate decoder given by spike counts or the sample mean, does not always efficiently decode the rate codes, but can improve efficiency in reading certain rate codes, when correlations within a spike train are taken into account.