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Section: New Software and Platforms

PRANAS

Platform for Retinal ANalysis And Simulation

Keywords: Retina - Neural Code - Data management - Statistics - Modeling - Vision

Scientific Description: PRANAS was designed as a user-friendly tool dedicated to neuroscientist community in a large sense, i.e., not only experienced computational neuroscientists. It has two main goals : (i) to analyze retina data, especially spatio-temporal correlations, at single cell but also population levels, (ii) to simulate the spike response of the retina to a visual flow with a customizable retina simulator which evolves in synergy with experimental data analysis. In general, PRANAS allows to explore several aspects of retinal image processing such as understanding how to reproduce accurately the statistics of the spiking activity at the population level, or reconciling connectomics and simple computational rules for visual motion detection. This makes this tool a unique platform to better understand how the retina works.

Functional Description: The retina encodes a visual scene by trains of action potentials sent to the brain via the optic nerve. PRANAS brings to neuroscientists and modelers tools to better understand this coding. It integrates a retina simulator allowing large scale simulations while keeping a strong biological plausibility and a toolbox for the analysis of spike trains population statistics. The statistical method (entropy maximization under constraints) takes into account both spatial and temporal correlations as constraints, allowing to analyze the effects of memory on statistics. PRANAS also integrates a tool computing and representing in 3D (time-space) receptive fields. All these tools are accessible through a friendly graphical user interface. The most CPU-costly of them has been implemented to run in parallel. The actual version simulates healty retinas but the long term goal is to study retinas with a pathology (DMLA, Retinitis Pigmentosa, Glaucoma).