Synchronisation in Neural Mass Models

thalamocortical model

Supervisor - Dr. Basabdatta Sen Bhattacharya

Members - Advait Rane, Pranav Mahajan, Swapna Sasi

I worked in the BINN Lab, BITS Goa to study the synchronisation between neural populations in the Neural Mass Model of the Thalamocortical Visual Pathway.

A Neural Mass Model represents each neuronal population as a single neuron. The connectivity between these neurons is determined by the synapse weights. I worked on implementing a Neural Mass Model of the Thalamocortical Visual Pathway in the brain in Python as well as MATLAB. The model comprised the thalamic module, i.e. the LGN, with the thalamocortical relay(TCR), thalamic reticular nucleus(TRN) and thalamic interneurons(IN) populations, and the cortical module with the spiny stellate cell(SS4), the pyramidal cell(PY), the basket cell(B) populations. We modelled the layers 4 and 6 in the cortex.

To study the interaction between the model populations we studied the synchronisation between the population voltage outputs using synchronisation measures collated into a MATLAB toolbox. The measures included:

accompanied with visualisations like:

synchronisation measures

We published our work in IJCNN 2021 and presented in the Bernstein Conference 2020 as a poster. You can find the paper here.