Haghiri Saeed, Ahmadi Arash, Saif Mehrdad
IEEE Trans Biomed Circuits Syst. 2017 Feb;11(1):117-127. doi: 10.1109/TBCAS.2016.2583920. Epub 2016 Sep 20.
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.
神经胶质细胞,也被称为神经胶质或胶质细胞,是中枢神经系统(CNS)中为神经元提供支持和保护的非神经元细胞。它们在大脑中也起到支持细胞的作用。在多种神经胶质细胞中,星形神经胶质细胞,即星形胶质细胞,是大脑中数量最多的细胞群体。星形胶质细胞的重要作用,如神经元同步、突触信息调节、对神经活动的反馈以及细胞外调节,使得星形胶质细胞在脑部疾病中发挥着至关重要的作用。本文提出了一种改进的完整神经元 - 星形胶质细胞相互作用模型,该模型更适合在数字平台上高效且大规模地实现生物神经网络。仿真结果表明,改进后的完整相互作用模型能够重现原始神经元 - 星形胶质细胞机制的类生物行为。针对低成本硬件实现,从数字实现可行性和成本方面对改进后的相互作用模型进行了研究。研究并比较了这种相互作用在两种情况下的网络行为:i)无星形胶质细胞影响的神经元放电机制,以及ii)星形胶质细胞通过控制长时程增强(LTP)和长时程抑制(LTD)过程来调节神经元行为和突触传递的作用。在现场可编程门阵列(FPGA)上的硬件实现表明,与原始相互作用模型相比,改进后的模型以更高的性能和显著更低的硬件开销成本模拟了神经元 - 星形胶质细胞通信的主要机制。