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Functional Diversity in the Retina Improves the Population Code
摘要： Within a given brain region, individual neurons exhibit a wide variety of different feature selectivities. Here, we investigated the impact of this extensive functional diversity on the population neural code. Our approach was to build optimal decoders to discriminate among stimuli using the spiking output of a real, measured neural population and compare its performance against a matched, homogeneous neural population with the same number of cells and spikes. Analyzing large populations of retinal ganglion cells, we found that the real, heterogeneous population can yield a discrimination error lower than the homogeneous population by several orders of magnitude and consequently can encode much more visual information. This effect increases with population size and with graded degrees of heterogeneity. We complemented these results with an analysis of coding based on the Chernoff distance, as well as derivations of inequalities on coding in certain limits, from which we can conclude that the beneficial effect of heterogeneity occurs over a broad set of conditions. Together, our results indicate that the presence of functional diversity in neural populations can enhance their coding fidelity appreciably. A noteworthy outcome of our study is that this effect can be extremely strong and should be taken into account when investigating design principles for neural circuits.
关键词： retina,neural coding,discrimination error,mutual information,functional diversity,Chernoff distance,population code,heterogeneity
更新于2025-09-23 15:23:52
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[IEEE 2018 25th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) - Athens, Greece (2018.10.7-2018.10.10)] 2018 25th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) - A Retina-Inspired Encoder: An Innovative Step on Image Coding Using Leaky Integrate-and-Fire Neurons
摘要： This paper aims to build an image coding system based on a model of the mammalian retina. The retina is the light-sensitive layer of tissue located on the inner coat of the eye and it is responsible for vision. Inspired by the way the retina handles and compresses visual information and based on previous studies we aim to build and analytically study a retinal-inspired image quantizer, based on the Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) model, a neural model approximating the behavior of the ganglion cells of the Ganglionic retinal layer that is responsible for visual data compression. In order to have a more concrete view of the encoder's behavior, in our experiments, we make use of the spatiotemporal decomposition layers provided by extensive studies on a previous retinal layer, the Outer Plexiform Layer (OPL). The decomposition layers produced by the OPL, are being encoded using our LIF image encoder and then, they are reconstructed to observe the encoder's efficiency.
关键词： weighted difference of Gaussians,neural coding,Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) model,Ganglion cells,image coding,Retina
更新于2025-09-23 15:22:29
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Photoreceptive retinal ganglion cells control the information rate of the optic nerve
摘要： Information transfer in the brain relies upon energetically expensive spiking activity of neurons. Rates of information flow should therefore be carefully optimized, but mechanisms to control this parameter are poorly understood. We address this deficit in the visual system, where ambient light (irradiance) is predictive of the amount of information reaching the eye and ask whether a neural measure of irradiance can therefore be used to proactively control information flow along the optic nerve. We first show that firing rates for the retina’s output neurons [retinal ganglion cells (RGCs)] scale with irradiance and are positively correlated with rates of information and the gain of visual responses. Irradiance modulates firing in the absence of any other visual signal confirming that this is a genuine response to changing ambient light. Irradiance-driven changes in firing are observed across the population of RGCs (including in both ON and OFF units) but are disrupted in mice lacking melanopsin [the photopigment of irradiance-coding intrinsically photosensitive RGCs (ipRGCs)] and can be induced under steady light exposure by chemogenetic activation of ipRGCs. Artificially elevating firing by chemogenetic excitation of ipRGCs is sufficient to increase information flow by increasing the gain of visual responses, indicating that enhanced firing is a cause of increased information transfer at higher irradiance. Our results establish a retinal circuitry driving changes in RGC firing as an active response to alterations in ambient light to adjust the amount of visual information transmitted to the brain.
关键词： neural coding,ipRGC,retina,melanopsin,information
更新于2025-09-10 09:29:36