ourESRexplains #1


Luca explains the new computational model of vision developed by his laboratory and the importance of this tool in the research for vison restoration.

Antolik’s Computational Systems Neuroscience Group (CSNG) in Prague has developed a computational model of the primary visual cortex, the first region of our cortex in which visual information is transmitted and a key target region for visual prostheses.
This model simulates the behavior of tens of thousands of neurons and has been carefully designed to take into account biological details discovered in many previous experiments. Such an approach makes the model behave very similarly to the corresponding brain area and can be used as a simulation environment, allowing testing of hypotheses and performing of experiments that could not be done otherwise.
In this new paper for instance, neural activity evoked under normal visual conditions is compared to the one induced by optogenetic prosthetic stimulation .
Our ESR11 and ESR12’s research work follows the direction of this recent publication. In fact, they work on the designing and testing of prosthetic stimulation protocols that evokes neural activity in a functionally specific manner, to evoke patterns of activity that closely resembles the one of normal vision conditions.