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Exploring the Population Characteristics of Direction-Selective Ganglion Cells Across the Retinal Space
Svatoň, Jan ; Paštěka, Richard (oponent) ; Jösch, Maximilian (vedoucí práce)
In the last century, substantial research has been dedicated to gaining an understanding of how visual information is encoded by neural populations and circuits. The overall picture that emerged from these efforts shows that visual information is first processed by intricate circuitries in the retina and subsequently relayed to higher brain structures. Both stages appear to have developed remarkably sophisticated computations. The functional study of these neuronal transformations has been examined either using electrophysiological or imaging techniques. In the retina, these techniques have limited the analysis of spatial specializations across the retina, either by the number of available electrodes (in electrophysiology) or the size of the field-of-view (FOV) (in imaging experiments). For example, simultaneous recordings of retinal ganglion cells (RGC) have been confined to an area (~ 200 x 200 um2) using state-of-the-art imaging techniques. In my thesis, I have explored a newly developed method that uses a FOV, which is 40-times larger in comparison with conventional optical methods, allowing me to overcome this technical limitation. This thesis uses this novel method to explore population characteristics of direction-selective ganglion cells (DSGCs) across the retinal space of mouse retinas. By recreating already known population patterns, we confirmed that our novel imaging method works. In addition, this thesis investigates the effects of adjuvants for enhanced global RGC infection rates that may potentially facilitate the unbiased recording of RGCs and introduces a novel stimulus for inspecting receptive fields (RFs) of RGCs. This novel stimulus outperforms conventional stimuli used in current studies in both the resolution of the yielded RF and the necessary time of stimulus presentation. It opens the door for following studies to describe for the first time the distribution patterns of RFs across the retinal space and to improve the clustering of cell classes.
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Hybrid Method for Modelling and State Estimation of Dynamic Systems
Brablc, Martin ; Blaha, Petr (oponent) ; Bugeja, Marvin (oponent) ; Grepl, Robert (vedoucí práce)
This Doctoral thesis deals with the development of a new hybrid method for the dual estimation of states and parameters of nonlinear dynamic systems based on the idea of local linear models, which uses the estimation of the uncertainty of the model parameters to automatically adjust the parameters of the Kalman filter (KF), thus greatly simplifying its deployment and adjustment in practical applications. In the first part, the dissertation summarises the current state of knowledge in the field of dynamic systems, simultaneous estimation, KF and modelling of nonlinear dynamic systems. Then, in two separate chapters, it discusses the modification of KF for situations where inaccurate model parameters are the dominant influence causing process noise, and the modification of the Receptive field weighted regression (RFWR) method so that it can be used for dual estimation. Finally, the paper describes the developed hybrid method composed of modified RFWR and KF algorithms called Receptive field dual estimation - (RFDE) and demonstrates its performance on simulation and real data.
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Exploring the Population Characteristics of Direction-Selective Ganglion Cells Across the Retinal Space
Svatoň, Jan ; Paštěka, Richard (oponent) ; Jösch, Maximilian (vedoucí práce)
In the last century, substantial research has been dedicated to gaining an understanding of how visual information is encoded by neural populations and circuits. The overall picture that emerged from these efforts shows that visual information is first processed by intricate circuitries in the retina and subsequently relayed to higher brain structures. Both stages appear to have developed remarkably sophisticated computations. The functional study of these neuronal transformations has been examined either using electrophysiological or imaging techniques. In the retina, these techniques have limited the analysis of spatial specializations across the retina, either by the number of available electrodes (in electrophysiology) or the size of the field-of-view (FOV) (in imaging experiments). For example, simultaneous recordings of retinal ganglion cells (RGC) have been confined to an area (~ 200 x 200 um2) using state-of-the-art imaging techniques. In my thesis, I have explored a newly developed method that uses a FOV, which is 40-times larger in comparison with conventional optical methods, allowing me to overcome this technical limitation. This thesis uses this novel method to explore population characteristics of direction-selective ganglion cells (DSGCs) across the retinal space of mouse retinas. By recreating already known population patterns, we confirmed that our novel imaging method works. In addition, this thesis investigates the effects of adjuvants for enhanced global RGC infection rates that may potentially facilitate the unbiased recording of RGCs and introduces a novel stimulus for inspecting receptive fields (RFs) of RGCs. This novel stimulus outperforms conventional stimuli used in current studies in both the resolution of the yielded RF and the necessary time of stimulus presentation. It opens the door for following studies to describe for the first time the distribution patterns of RFs across the retinal space and to improve the clustering of cell classes.
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