Biomedical subjects

Shih-Chii Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Shih-Chii Liu.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Oculomotor instabilities in zebrafish mutant belladonna: a behavioral model for congenital nystagmus caused by axonal misrouting.

A large fraction of homozygous zebrafish mutant belladonna (bel) larvae display a reversed optokinetic response (OKR) that correlates with failure of the retinal ganglion cells to cross the midline and form the optic chiasm. Some of these achiasmatic mutants display strong spontaneous eye oscillations (SOs) in the absence of motion in the surround. The presentation of a stationary grating was necessary and sufficient to evoke SO. Both OKR reversal and SO depend on vision and are contrast sensitive. We built a quantitative model derived from bel fwd (forward) eye behaviors. To mimic the achiasmatic condition, we reversed the sign of the retinal slip velocity in the model, thereby successfully reproducing both reversed OKR and SO. On the basis of the OKR data, and with the support of the quantitative model, we hypothesize that the reversed OKR and the SO can be completely attributed to RGC misrouting. The strong resemblance between the SO and congenital nystagmus (CN) seen in humans with defective retinotectal projections implies that CN, of so far unknown etiology, may be directly caused by a projection defect.

Animals↗

PubMed2004

A silicon early visual system as a model animal.

Examples that show the transfer of our basic knowledge of brain function into practical electronic models are rare. Here we present a user-friendly silicon model of the early visual system that contributes to animal welfare. The silicon chip emulates the neurons in the visual system by using analog Very Large Scale Integration (aVLSI) circuits. It substitutes for a live animal in experiment design and lecture demonstrations. The neurons on this chip display properties that are central to biological vision: receptive fields, spike coding, adaptation, band-pass filtering, and complementary signaling. Unlike previous laboratory devices whose complexity was limited by the use of discrete components on printed circuit boards, this battery-powered chip is a self-contained patch of the visual system. The realistic responses of the chip's cells and the self-contained adjustment-free correct operation of the chip suggest the possibility of implementation of similar circuits for visual prosthetics.

Animals↗

PubMed2004

Temporal coding in a silicon network of integrate-and-fire neurons.

Spatio-temporal processing of spike trains by neuronal networks depends on a variety of mechanisms distributed across synapses, dendrites, and somata. In natural systems, the spike trains and the processing mechanisms cohere though their common physical instantiation. This coherence is lost when the natural system is encoded for simulation on a general purpose computer. By contrast, analog VLSI circuits are, like neurons, inherently related by their real-time physics, and so, could provide a useful substrate for exploring neuronlike event-based processing. Here, we describe a hybrid analog-digital VLSI chip comprising a set of integrate-and-fire neurons and short-term dynamical synapses that can be configured into simple network architectures with some properties of neocortical neuronal circuits. We show that, despite considerable fabrication variance in the properties of individual neurons, the chip offers a viable substrate for exploring real-time spike-based processing in networks of neurons.

Action Potentials↗

PubMed2003

Modeling short-term synaptic depression in silicon.

We describe a model of short-term synaptic depression that is derived from a circuit implementation. The dynamics of this circuit model is similar to the dynamics of some theoretical models of short-term depression except that the recovery dynamics of the variable describing the depression is nonlinear and it also depends on the presynaptic frequency. The equations describing the steady-state and transient responses of this synaptic model are compared to the experimental results obtained from a fabricated silicon network consisting of leaky integrate-and-fire neurons and different types of short-term dynamic synapses. We also show experimental data demonstrating the possible computational roles of depression. One possible role of a depressing synapse is that the input can quickly bring the neuron up to threshold when the membrane potential is close to the resting potential.

Long-Term Synaptic Depression↗