A Python Code for Simulating Single Tactile Receptors and the Spiking Responses of Their Afferents

Published on April 17, 2019

A Python Code for Simulating Single Tactile Receptors and the Spiking Responses of Their Afferents

Juan Wu*, Zhiyu Shao, Miao Wu and Zhiyong Cao
State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, School of Instrument Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China
This work presents a pieces of Python code to rapidly simulate the spiking responses of large numbers of single cutaneous tactile afferents with millisecond precision. To simulate the spike responses of all the major types of cutaneous tactile afferents, we proposed an electromechanical circuit model, in which a two-channel filter was developed to characterize the mechanical selectivity of tactile receptors, and a spike synthesizer was designed to recreate the action potentials evoked in afferents. The parameters of this model were fitted using previous neurophysiological datasets. Several simulation examples were presented in this paper to reproduce action potentials, sensory adaptation, frequency characteristics and spiking timing for each afferent type. The results indicated that the simulated responses matched previous neurophysiological recordings well. The model allows for a real-time reproduction of the spiking responses of about 4,000 tactile units with a timing precision of

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