We propose to embed biologically realistic models of simulated prosthetic vision in immersive virtual reality so that sighted subjects can act as 'virtual patients' in real-world tasks.
We combined deep learning-based scene simplification strategies with a psychophysically validated computational model of the retina to generate realistic predictions of simulated prosthetic vision.
In this review, we provide an accessible primer to modern modeling approaches and highlight recent data-driven discoveries in the domains of neuroimaging, single-neuron and neuronal population responses, and device neuroengineering.
Brains face the fundamental challenge of extracting relevant information from high-dimensional external stimuli in order to form the neural basis that can guide an organism's behavior and its interaction with the world. One potential approach to addressing this challenge is to reduce the number of variables required to represent a particular input space (i.e., dimensionality reduction). We review compelling evidence that a range of neuronal responses can be understood as an emergent property of nonnegative sparse coding (NSC)—a form of efficient population coding due to dimensionality reduction and sparsity constraints.
We show that the perceptual experience of retinal implant users can be accurately predicted using a computational model that simulates each individual patient’s retinal ganglion axon pathways.
To investigate the effect of axonal stimulation on the retinal response, we developed a computational model of a small population of morphologically and biophysically detailed retinal ganglion cells, and simulated their response to epiretinal electrical stimulation. We found that activation thresholds of ganglion cell somas and axons varied systematically with both stimulus pulse duration and electrode-retina distance. These findings have important implications for the improvement of stimulus encoding methods for epiretinal prostheses.
We have developed CARLsim 4, a user-friendly SNN library written in C++ that can simulate large biologically detailed neural networks. Improving on the efficiency and scalability of earlier releases, the present release allows for the simulation using multiple GPUs and multiple CPU cores concurrently in a heterogeneous computing cluster. Benchmarking results demonstrate simulation of 8.6 million neurons and 0.48 billion synapses using 4 GPUs and up to 60x speedup for multi-GPU implementations over a single-threaded CPU implementation, making CARLsim 4 well-suited for large-scale SNN models in the presence of real-time constraints.
*pulse2percept* is an open-source Python simulation framework used to predict the perceptual experience of retinal prosthesis patients across a wide range of implant configurations.