PRANAS: A New Platform for Retinal Analysis and Simulation

• Main Authors: Bruno Cessac, Pierre Kornprobst, Selim Kraria, Hassan Nasser, Daniela Pamplona, Geoffrey Portelli, Thierry Viéville
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2017-09-01
• Series: Frontiers in Neuroinformatics
• Subjects: retina simulator; spike train statistics; population coding; maximum entropy; Gibbs distributions; large scale spiking activity
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fninf.2017.00049/full

The retina encodes visual scenes by trains of action potentials that are sent to the brain via the optic nerve. In this paper, we describe a new free access user-end software allowing to better understand this coding. It is called PRANAS (https://pranas.inria.fr), standing for Platform for Retinal ANalysis And Simulation. PRANAS targets neuroscientists and modelers by providing a unique set of retina-related tools. PRANAS integrates a retina simulator allowing large scale simulations while keeping a strong biological plausibility and a toolbox for the analysis of spike train 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 have been implemented to run in parallel.