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  • the Korean Society for Brain and Neural Sciences

Article

Original Article

Exp Neurobiol 2020; 29(6): 433-452

Published online December 16, 2020

https://doi.org/10.5607/en20029

© The Korean Society for Brain and Neural Sciences

Spike-triggered Clustering for Retinal Ganglion Cell Classification

Jungryul Ahn1, Yongseok Yoo2* and Yong Sook Goo1*

1Department of Physiology, Chungbuk National University School of Medicine, Cheongju 28644,
2Department of Electronics Engineering, Incheon National University, Incheon 22012, Korea

Correspondence to: *To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Yongseok Yoo, TEL: 82-32-835-8453, FAX: 82-32-835-0774
e-mail: yyoo@inu.ac.kr
Yong Sook Goo, TEL: 82-43-261-2870, FAX: 82-43-272-1603
e-mail: ysgoo@chungbuk.ac.kr

Received: July 10, 2020; Revised: November 24, 2020; Accepted: November 25, 2020

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), the retina’s output neurons, encode visual information through spiking. The RGC receptive field (RF) represents the basic unit of visual information processing in the retina. RFs are commonly estimated using the spike-triggered average (STA), which is the average of the stimulus patterns to which a given RGC is sensitive. Whereas STA, based on the concept of the average, is simple and intuitive, it leaves more complex structures in the RFs undetected. Alternatively, spike-triggered covariance (STC) analysis provides information on second-order RF statistics. However, STC is computationally cumbersome and difficult to interpret. Thus, the objective of this study was to propose and validate a new computational method, called spike-triggered clustering (STCL), specific for multimodal RFs. Specifically, RFs were fit with a Gaussian mixture model, which provides the means and covariances of multiple RF clusters. The proposed method recovered bipolar stimulus patterns in the RFs of ON-OFF cells, while the STA identified only ON and OFF RGCs, and the remaining RGCs were labeled as unknown types. In contrast, our new STCL analysis distinguished ON-OFF RGCs from the ON, OFF, and unknown RGC types classified by STA. Thus, the proposed method enables us to include ON-OFF RGCs prior to retinal information analysis.

Graphical Abstract


Keywords: Receptive fields, Retinal ganglion cells, Spike-triggered clustering, Spike-triggered average, Spike-triggered covariance