Complete Neuron-Astrocyte Interaction Model: Digital Multiplierless Design and Networking Mechanism

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-1-2017

Publication Title

IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems

Volume

11

Issue

1

First Page

117

Keywords

Astrocyte, biological neuron model, glial cells, neuroglia interactions

Last Page

127

Abstract

Glial cells, also known as neuroglia or glia, are non-neuronal cells providing support and protection for neurons in the central nervous system (CNS). They also act as supportive cells in the brain. Among a variety of glial cells, the star-shaped glial cells, i.e., astrocytes, are the largest cell population in the brain. The important role of astrocyte such as neuronal synchronization, synaptic information regulation, feedback to neural activity and extracellular regulation make the astrocytes play a vital role in brain disease. This paper presents a modified complete neuron-astrocyte interaction model that is more suitable for efficient and large scale biological neural network realization on digital platforms. Simulation results show that the modified complete interaction model can reproduce biological-like behavior of the original neuron-astrocyte mechanism. The modified interaction model is investigated in terms of digital realization feasibility and cost targeting a low cost hardware implementation. Networking behavior of this interaction is investigated and compared between two cases: i) the neuron spiking mechanism without astrocyte effects, and ii) the effect of astrocyte in regulating the neurons behavior and synaptic transmission via controlling the LTP and LTD processes. Hardware implementation on FPGA shows that the modified model mimics the main mechanism of neuron-astrocyte communication with higher performance and considerably lower hardware overhead cost compared with the original interaction model.

DOI

10.1109/TBCAS.2016.2583920

ISSN

19324545

PubMed ID

27662685

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