Towards the reconstruction of moving images by populations of retinal ganglion cells

Abstract

One of the many important functions the brain carries out is interpreting the external world. For this, one sense that most mammals rely on is vision. The first stage of the visual system is the image processing whose capture takes place in the retina. Here, photoreceptors cells transform light into electrical impulses that are then guided by amacrine, bipolar, horizontal and some glial cells up to the ganglion cells layer. Ganglion cells decode the visual information to be interpreted by the visual cortex. The understanding of the mechanism for decoding the visual information is a major task and challenge in neuroscience. This is especially true for images that change with time, for example during movement. For this purpose, extracellular recordings with a 100 multielectrode- array (MEA) were carried out in the retinal ganglion cells layer of mice. Different moving patterns and actual images were used to stimulate the retina. Here, we present a new strategy for analysis over the spike trains recorded allowing the reconstruction of the actual stimuli with a reduced number of ganglion cell responses.