A cascade model of information processing and encoding for retinal prosthesis

摘要

Retinal prosthesis offers a potential treatment for individuals suffering from photoreceptor degeneration diseases. Establishing biological retinal models and simulating how the biological retina convert incoming light signal into spike trains that can be properly decoded by the brain is a key issue. Some retinal models have been presented, ranking from structural models inspired by the layered architecture to functional models originated from a set of speciifc physiological phenomena. However, Most of these focus on stimulus image com-pression, edge detection and reconstruction, but do not generate spike trains corresponding to visual image. In this study, based on state-of-the-art retinal physiological mechanism, including effective visual information extraction, static nonlinear rectiifcation of biological systems and neurons Poisson coding, a cascade model of the retina including the out plexiform layer for information processing and the inner plexiform layer for information encoding was brought forward, which integrates both anatomic connections and functional com-putations of retina. Using MATLAB software, spike trains corresponding to stimulus image were numerically computed by four steps:linear spatiotemporal ifltering, static nonlinear rectiifcation, radial sampling and then Poisson spike generation. The simulated results suggested that such a cascade model could recreate visual information processing and encoding functionalities of the retina, which is helpful in developing artiifcial retina for the retinally blind.