Tens of millions of people around the world are blind. Recent bio-technological advances offer hope for restoration of vision in blind patients via a prosthetic device that taps directly into cortex, where it feeds information from head mounted camera. While all the technological components of the visual prosthesis are still under development, an important question remains open: how to stimulate the cortex to elicit percepts that are close to those due to the perception of the given stimulus under normal vision. Using simulations of early visual cortex that are being developed in our lab [1], we are making progress at answering this question. Currently, we have gained insights on how to elicit precepts of simple canonical visual stimuli. The student will take this project to the next step, and will expand the design of this stimulation protocol so that it is capable of eliciting arbitrary visual stimuli. The current protocol can be straightforwardly expanded to this general case. The student's responsibility will be to implement this new stimulation protocol in our simulation framework [2], test the protocol in existing model of primary visual cortex [1], and implement and perform all the required analysis.
References
[1] J Antolík, C Monier, A Davison, Y Frégnac; A comprehensive data-driven model of cat primary visual cortex. bioRxiv, 416156
[2] Antolík, J., & Davison, A. P. (2013). Integrated workflows for spiking neuronal network simulations. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, 7(December), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fninf.2013.00034
