Retinal implants electrically stimulate surviving retinal neurons to restore vision in people blinded by outer retinal degeneration. Although the healthy retina is known to transmit a vast amount of visual information to the brain, it has not been studied whether prosthetic vision contains a similar amount of information. Here, we assessed the neural information transmitted by population responses arising in brisk transient (BT) and brisk sustained (BS) subtypes of ON and OFF retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) in the rabbit retina. To correlate the response heterogeneity and the information transmission, we first quantified the cell-to-cell heterogeneity by calculating the spike time tiling coefficient (STTC) across spiking patterns of RGCs in each type. Then, we computed the neural information encoded by the RGC population in a given type. In responses to light stimulation, spiking activities were more heterogeneous in OFF than ON RGCs (STTC _AVG = 0.36, 0.45, 0.77 and 0.55 for OFF BT, OFF BS, ON BT, and ON BS, respectively). Interestingly, however, in responses to electric stimulation, both BT and BS subtypes of OFF RGCs showed remarkably homogeneous spiking patterns across cells (STTC _AVG = 0.93 and 0.82 for BT and BS, respectively), whereas the two subtypes of ON RGCs showed slightly increased populational heterogeneity compared to light-evoked responses (STTC _AVG = 0.71 and 0.63 for BT and BS, respectively). Consequently, the neural information encoded by the electrically-evoked responses of a population of 15 RGCs was substantially lower in the OFF than the ON pathway: OFF BT and BS cells transmit only ~23% and ~53% of the neural information transmitted by their ON counterparts. Together with previously-reported natural spiking activities in ON RGCs, the higher neural information may make ON responses more recognizable, eliciting the biased percepts of bright phosphenes.

中文翻译：

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电刺激可在视网膜神经节细胞中激活异种反应，从而传递丰富的神经信息

视网膜植入物可电刺激存活的视网膜神经元，以恢复因外部视网膜变性致盲的人的视力。尽管已知健康的视网膜会向大脑传输大量的视觉信息，但尚未研究假肢视觉是否包含类似数量的信息。在这里，我们评估了由兔子视网膜中的ON和OFF视网膜神经节细胞（RGC）的轻快瞬态（BT）和轻快持续（BS）亚型引起的群体反应所传递的神经信息。为了使响应异质性与信息传输相关联，我们首先通过计算每种类型RGC的尖峰模式中的尖峰时间拼接系数（STTC）来量化单元间异质性。然后，我们计算了给定类型的RGC群体编码的神经信息。 OFF BT，OFF BS，ON BT和ON BS的_AVG分别为0.36、0.45、0.77和0.55）。然而，有趣的是，在对电刺激的反应中，OFF RGC的BT和BS亚型在细胞之间均显示出明显的均匀峰型（BT和BS的STTC _AVG分别为0.93和0.82），而ON RGC的两个亚型则略有增加人群异质性与轻度诱发反应相比（STTC _AVG分别为BT和BS = 0.71和0.63）。因此，由15个RGC的群体的电诱发反应编码的神经信息在OFF时要比ON通路低得多：OFF BT和BS细胞仅传输约23％和〜53％的神经信息。在同行。连同先前在ON RGC中报告的自然加标活性一起，较高的神经信息可能使ON反应更加可识别，从而引起明亮的磷化氢的偏见。