The School of Biotechnology‘s, Computational Neuroscience Lab has developed a new open source softwarefor modeling local field potentials in neurons and neural circuits models called LFPsim.
Computational Neuroscience is the study of brain, its cells and circuits via mathematical modeling and simulating them in computers or supercomputers. One of the most common types of signals recorded in the brain are extracellular signals and they help understand neural function and to model dysfunction as in the case of neurological disorders. Harilal Parasuram, a PhD student at the Computational Neuroscience Lab and his mentor Prof. Shyam Diwakar have developed an open-source software called LFPsim to automatically model how extracellular signals called local field potentials are generated by neurons. The software was developed to work with models developed with NEURON simulation platform.
A paper has also been published recently in the journal, Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience titled “Computational Modeling of Single Neuron Extracellular Electric Potentials and Network Local Field Potentials using LFPsim.”
The paper is in collaboration with University of Pavia’s Prof. Egidio D’Angelo, Yale School of Medicine’s Prof. Michael Hines and University of Milan’s Prof. Giovanni Naldi and Amrita School of Biotechnology’s Prof. Bipin Nair. The Computational Neuroscience lab has been having working collaborations with Milan and Pavia in Italy via the Indo-Italy Program of Cooperation 2012-14. Prof.Michael Hines is one of the developers of NEURON simulation environment.
The software allows to mathematically model neural extracellular fields, local field potentials (LFP) in neural circuits and to simulate multi-electrode array of LFP in large-scale circuit models. The novelty of such tools is that they will help design new protocols for experimenters, allow modelers to constrain their mathematical models and will serve as a useful education tool.
The source code of LFPsim is also available.
The Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience is an open access, impact 2.201 journal based at Geneva, Switzerland.
