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Section: Software and Platforms
Virtual Retina: A Large-Scale Simulator of Biological Retina
Participants : Bruno Cessac, Maria-Jose Escobar [Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Valparaiso, Chile] , Christobal Nettle [Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Valparaiso, Chile] , Pierre Kornprobst, Adrien Wohrer [Group for Neural Theory - ENS, Paris, France] .
Virtual Retina is a simulation software developped by Adrien Wohrer during his PhD [73] , [72] that allows large-scale simulations of biologically-plausible retinas.
Virtual Retina has a variety of biological features implemented such as (i) spatio-temporal linear filter implementing the basic center/surround organization of retinal filtering, (ii) non-linear contrast gain control mechanism providing instantaneous adaptation to the local level of contrast; (iii) spike generation by one or several layers of ganglion cells paving the visual field.
Virtual Retina is under Inria CeCill C open-source licence, so that one can download it, install it and run it on one's own image sequences. Virtual Retina also offers a web service (v 2.1), so that users may test directly the main software on their own data, without any installation. This webservice was developed in collaboration with Nicolas Debeissat (engineer, 2002).
We are now interested in the analysis of the collective behavior of ganglion cells responses. To take this collective behavior into account, Virtual Retina needs to be extended since in its current version, ganglion cells are independent. The goal is to produce better retinal models from experimental recordings obtained with our collaborators at the Institut de la Vision (Olivier Marre and Serge Picaud), Evelyne Sernagor (New Castle University) and Luca Berdondini (IIT) using e.g. multi-electrode arrays. This will allow us to better understand the correlations between retina spikes trains and to improve the Virtual Retina model [72] in such a way that it could reproduce the retinal response at the population level. Another application is to the electric stimulation of a retina with implanted multi-electrode arrays in collaboration with the Institut de la Vision and the INT (Frédéric Chavane). Other evolutions of Virtual Retina are also investigated by external partners like the role/implementation of starbust amacrine cells involved in direction selectivity (collaboration with Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Valparaiso, Chile, and Centro de Neurociencia de Valaparaiso) (see also e.g., [64] ).