Reconstruction of natural images from responses of primate retinal ganglion cells
- Stanford University, United States
- University of California, Santa Cruz, United States
- Stanford School of Medicine, United States
Abstract
The visual message conveyed by a retinal ganglion cell (RGC) is often summarized by its spatial receptive field, but in principle also depends on the responses of other RGCs and natural image statistics. This possibility was explored by linear reconstruction of natural images from responses of the four numerically-dominant macaque RGC types. Reconstructions were highly consistent across retinas. The optimal reconstruction filter for each RGC – its visual message – reflected natural image statistics, and resembled the receptive field only when nearby, same-type cells were included. ON and OFF cells conveyed largely independent, complementary representations, and parasol and midget cells conveyed distinct features. Correlated activity and nonlinearities had statistically significant but minor effects on reconstruction. Simulated reconstructions, using linear-nonlinear cascade models of RGC light responses that incorporated measured spatial properties and nonlinearities, produced similar results. Spatiotemporal reconstructions exhibited similar spatial properties, suggesting that the results are relevant for natural vision.
Data availability
Code and data to generate all of the summary plots are included in the supporting files. We are not able to release the raw voltage recordings, which total >5 TBs and require a complex processing pipeline. This paper is only the first analysis using these large data sets, which were collected over many years, and are still in use by students in our lab for other projects and papers funded by grants that were used to acquire them in a lab-wide collaboration. We will be happy to work directly with specific researchers to release additional data to them for the purposes of replication only, but not for further use, until we have had an opportunity to complete our analysis of the data and the PhD students doing this work have been able to publish their findings.
Article and author information
Author details
Nishal Pradeepbhai Shah
Funding
National Science Foundation (NSF IGERT 0801700)
- Nora Brackbill
National Science Foundation (CRCNS Grant IIS-1430348)
- E J Chichilnisky
National Science Foundation (GRFP DGE-114747)
- Nora Brackbill
- Colleen Rhoades
National Eye Institute (F31EY027166)
- Colleen Rhoades
Pew Charitable Trusts (Fellowship in Biomedical Sciences)
- Alexander Sher
John Chen (donation)
- Alan M Litke
National Institutes of Health (R01EY017992)
- E J Chichilnisky
National Institutes of Health (R01-EY029247)
- E J Chichilnisky
National Eye Institute (R01-EY029247)
- E J Chichilnisky
National Institutes of Health (CRCNS Grant IIS-1430348)
- E J Chichilnisky
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: Animal experimentation: Eyes were removed from terminally anesthetized macaque monkeys (Macaca mulatta, Macaca fascicularis) used by other laboratories in the course of their experiments, in accordance with the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee guidelines. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocols (#28860) of the Stanford University. The protocol was approved by the Administrative Panel on Laboratory Animal Care of the Stanford University (Assurance Number: A3213-01).
Copyright
© 2020, Brackbill et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Reconstruction of natural images from responses of primate retinal ganglion cells
eLife 9:e58516.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.58516
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