Retinal Circuit Engineering

A special issue of Bioengineering (ISSN 2306-5354). This special issue belongs to the section "Biosignal Processing".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 June 2024 | Viewed by 130

Special Issue Editors

Department of Information Engineering, Mie University, 1577 Kurima-machiya, Tsu 514-8507, Mie, Japan
Interests: visual neurophysiology; retinal circuit model; neuro-morphic hardware; visual prosthesis; edge machine learning inference; life-assistive intelligence
Department of Human Intelligence Systems, Kyushu institute of Technology, 2-4 Hibikino, Wakamatsu, Kitakyushu, Fukuoka 808-0196, Japan
Interests: bio-inspired robot vision; retinal circuit model; neuro-morphic hardware; edge machine learning inference; hardware simulation

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Neuroscience studies have revealed that biological neural circuits are equipped with various components that enable cost-effective and intelligent computation. As part of the central nervous system, the vertebrate neural retina receives photons and generates electrical spike signals that are sent to the brain. Investigating genetics, morphology, and physiology has led to identifying more than ten subtypes of retinal ganglion cells. These subtypes are thought to host parallel output channels that encode multiple different information into spatiotemporal patterns of spike signals. Retinal neuron types and their synaptic connections have been studied for decades as building blocks for circuits that route signals to those output channels. The light-induced response properties of retinal neurons have been measured by performing physiological experiments. Despite such advances in neuroscience, our theoretical and computational understanding of the retinal neural circuitry connecting the output channels is still premature for applying scientific knowledge to biomimetic robots or visual prostheses. On the other hand, machine learning methodologies have become increasingly popular in machine vision. Although machine visions are essentially different in their roles, properties, functions, and necessities from animals’ visions, technological progress in the field of machine learning may be useful for analyzing or recapturing the vertebrate retinal circuits, and, in turn, animals’ visions. For accelerating the quantitative understanding of vertebrate retinal circuits, this Special Issue on “Retinal Circuit Engineering” focuses on original research papers and comprehensive review papers dealing with vertebrate retinal circuits by means of physiological experiments, computational/hardware implementations, and prosthetic or robotic applications.

Dr. Yuki Hayashida
Dr. Shinsuke Yasukawa
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • physiology
  • modeling
  • hardware
  • prosthesis
  • robot

Published Papers

This special issue is now open for submission.
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