Modeling Retinal Ganglion Cell Population Activity with Restricted Boltzmann Machines

The retina is a complex nervous system which encodes visual stimuli before higher order processing occurs in the visual cortex. In this study we evaluated whether information about the stimuli received by the retina can be retrieved from the firing rate distribution of Retinal Ganglion Cells (RGCs), exploiting High-Density 64x64 MEA technology. To this end, we modeled the RGC population activity using mean-covariance Restricted Boltzmann Machines, latent variable models capable of learning the joint distribution of a set of continuous observed random variables and a set of binary unobserved random units. The idea was to figure out if binary latent states encode the regularities associated to different visual stimuli, as modes in the joint distribution. We measured the goodness of mcRBM encoding by calculating the Mutual Information between the latent states and the stimuli shown to the retina. Results show that binary states can encode the regularities associated to different stimuli, using both gratings and natural scenes as stimuli. We also discovered that hidden variables encode interesting properties of retinal activity, interpreted as population receptive fields. We further investigated the ability of the model to learn different modes in population activity by comparing results associated to a retina in normal conditions and after pharmacologically blocking GABA receptors (GABAC at first, and then also GABAA and GABAB). As expected, Mutual Information tends to decrease if we pharmacologically block receptors. We finally stress that the computational method described in this work could potentially be applied to any kind of neural data obtained through MEA technology, though different techniques should be applied to interpret the results.