ASIC Implementation of a Nonlinear Dynamical Model for Hippocampal Prosthesis.

A hippocampal prosthesis is a very large scale integration (VLSI) biochip that needs to be implanted in the biological brain to solve a cognitive dysfunction. In this letter, we propose a novel low-complexity, small-area, and low-power programmable hippocampal neural network application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for a hippocampal prosthesis. It is based on the nonlinear dynamical model of the hippocampus: namely multi-input, multi-output (MIMO)-generalized Laguerre-Volterra model (GLVM). It can realize the real-time prediction of hippocampal neural activity. New hardware architecture, a storage space configuration scheme, low-power convolution, and gaussian random number generator modules are proposed. The ASIC is fabricated in 40 nm technology with a core area of 0.122 mm[Formula: see text] and test power of 84.4 [Formula: see text]W. Compared with the design based on the traditional architecture, experimental results show that the core area of the chip is reduced by 84.94% and the core power is reduced by 24.30%.

Evaluating functional connectivity of executive control network and frontoparietal network in Alzheimer's disease.

Investigating the early Alzheimer's disease (AD) more emphasizes sensitive and specific biomarkers, which can help the clinicians to monitor the progression and treatments of AD. Among these biomarkers, default mode network (DMN) functional connectivity is gaining more attention as a potential noninvasive biomarker to diagnose incipient Alzheimer's disease. However, besides changed functional connectivity of DMN, other functional networks haven't yet been examined systematically. Recent brain imaging studies reported that a number of reproducible and robust functional networks, which were distributed in distant neuroanatomic areas. Inspired by these works, in this paper, we apply sparse representation to the whole brain signals to identify these reproducible networks and detect partly affected brain regions of Alzheimer's disease, then adopt sparse inverse covariance estimation (SICE) approach to investigate the changed functional connectivity of intrinsic connectivity networks. Our experimental results show that besides DMN, AD is also affected by others large scale functional brain networks and regions, e.g., executive control network (ECN), frontoparietal network (FPN), where in the superior frontal gyrus (SFGmed) and middle frontal gyrus (MFG) of ECN and in the part paracentral Lobule (PCL) of FPN have an increased functional connectivity, as well as in the Superior Parietal Gyrus (SPG) regions of FPN has shown decreased connectivity. The results may suggest AD is associated with larger scale functional networks and causes the functional connectivity change of many different brain regions. It also proves that these networks may sometimes work together to perform tasks, and such changed functional connectivity may provide a useful baseline for early AD diagnosis.

Functional brain networks reconstruction using group sparsity-regularized learning.

Investigating functional brain networks and patterns using sparse representation of fMRI data has received significant interests in the neuroimaging community. It has been reported that sparse representation is effective in reconstructing concurrent and interactive functional brain networks. To date, most of data-driven network reconstruction approaches rarely take consideration of anatomical structures, which are the substrate of brain function. Furthermore, it has been rarely explored whether structured sparse representation with anatomical guidance could facilitate functional networks reconstruction. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose to reconstruct brain networks utilizing the structure guided group sparse regression (S2GSR) in which 116 anatomical regions from the AAL template, as prior knowledge, are employed to guide the network reconstruction when performing sparse representation of whole-brain fMRI data. Specifically, we extract fMRI signals from standard space aligned with the AAL template. Then by learning a global over-complete dictionary, with the learned dictionary as a set of features (regressors), the group structured regression employs anatomical structures as group information to regress whole brain signals. Finally, the decomposition coefficients matrix is mapped back to the brain volume to represent functional brain networks and patterns. We use the publicly available Human Connectome Project (HCP) Q1 dataset as the test bed, and the experimental results indicate that the proposed anatomically guided structure sparse representation is effective in reconstructing concurrent functional brain networks.

A memory efficient implementation scheme of Gauss error function in a Laguerre-Volterra network for neuroprosthetic devices.

Cognitive neural prosthesis is a manmade device which can be used to restore or compensate for lost human cognitive modalities. The generalized Laguerre-Volterra (GLV) network serves as a robust mathematical underpinning for the development of such prosthetic instrument. In this paper, a hardware implementation scheme of Gauss error function for the GLV network targeting reconfigurable platforms is reported. Numerical approximations are formulated which transform the computation of nonelementary function into combinational operations of elementary functions, and memory-intensive look-up table (LUT) based approaches can therefore be circumvented. The computational precision can be made adjustable with the utilization of an error compensation scheme, which is proposed based on the experimental observation of the mathematical characteristics of the error trajectory. The precision can be further customizable by exploiting the run-time characteristics of the reconfigurable system. Compared to the polynomial expansion based implementation scheme, the utilization of slice LUTs, occupied slices, and DSP48E1s on a Xilinx XC6VLX240T field-programmable gate array has decreased by 94.2%, 94.1%, and 90.0%, respectively. While compared to the look-up table based scheme, 1.0×1017 bits of storage can be spared under the maximum allowable error of 1.0×10-3. The proposed implementation scheme can be employed in the study of large-scale neural ensemble activity and in the design and development of neural prosthetic device.

An Application Specific Instruction Set Processor (ASIP) for Adaptive Filters in Neural Prosthetics.

Neural coding is an essential process for neuroprosthetic design, in which adaptive filters have been widely utilized. In a practical application, it is needed to switch between different filters, which could be based on continuous observations or point process, when the neuron models, conditions, or system requirements have changed. As candidates of coding chip for neural prostheses, low-power general purpose processors are not computationally efficient especially for large scale neural population coding. Application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) do not have flexibility to switch between different adaptive filters while the cost for design and fabrication is formidable. In this research work, we explore an application specific instruction set processor (ASIP) for adaptive filters in neural decoding activity. The proposed architecture focuses on efficient computation for the most time-consuming matrix/vector operations among commonly used adaptive filters, being able to provide both flexibility and throughput. Evaluation and implementation results are provided to demonstrate that the proposed ASIP design is area-efficient while being competitive to commercial CPUs in computational performance.

Personality, category, and cross-linguistic speech sound processing: a connectivistic view.

Category formation of human perception is a vital part of cognitive ability. The disciplines of neuroscience and linguistics, however, seldom mention it in the marrying of the two. The present study reviews the neurological view of language acquisition as normalization of incoming speech signal, and attempts to suggest how speech sound category formation may connect personality with second language speech perception. Through a questionnaire, (being thick or thin) ego boundary, a correlate found to be related to category formation, was proven a positive indicator of personality types. Following the qualitative study, thick boundary and thin boundary English learners native in Cantonese were given a speech-signal perception test using an ABX discrimination task protocol. Results showed that thick-boundary learners performed significantly lower in accuracy rate than thin-boundary learners. It was implied that differences in personality do have an impact on language learning.

Laguerre-Volterra model and architecture for MIMO system identification and output prediction.

A generalized mathematical model is proposed for behaviors prediction of biological causal systems with multiple inputs and multiple outputs (MIMO). The system properties are represented by a set of model parameters, which can be derived with random input stimuli probing it. The system calculates predicted outputs based on the estimated parameters and its novel inputs. An efficient hardware architecture is established for this mathematical model and its circuitry has been implemented using the field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). This architecture is scalable and its functionality has been validated by using experimental data gathered from real-world measurement.

A customizable stochastic state point process filter (SSPPF) for neural spiking activity.

Stochastic State Point Process Filter (SSPPF) is effective for adaptive signal processing. In particular, it has been successfully applied to neural signal coding/decoding in recent years. Recent work has proven its efficiency in non-parametric coefficients tracking in modeling of mammal nervous system. However, existing SSPPF has only been realized in commercial software platforms which limit their computational capability. In this paper, the first hardware architecture of SSPPF has been designed and successfully implemented on field-programmable gate array (FPGA), proving a more efficient means for coefficient tracking in a well-established generalized Laguerre-Volterra model for mammalian hippocampal spiking activity research. By exploring the intrinsic parallelism of the FPGA, the proposed architecture is able to process matrices or vectors with random size, and is efficiently scalable. Experimental result shows its superior performance comparing to the software implementation, while maintaining the numerical precision. This architecture can also be potentially utilized in the future hippocampal cognitive neural prosthesis design.

Real-time prediction of neuronal population spiking activity using FPGA.

A field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based hardware architecture is proposed and utilized for prediction of neuronal population firing activity. The hardware system adopts the multi-input multi-output (MIMO) generalized Laguerre-Volterra model (GLVM) structure to describe the nonlinear dynamic neural process of mammalian brain and can switch between the two important functions: estimation of GLVM coefficients and prediction of neuronal population spiking activity (model outputs). The model coefficients are first estimated using the in-sample training data; then the output is predicted using the out-of-sample testing data and the field estimated coefficients. Test results show that compared with previous software implementation of the generalized Laguerre-Volterra algorithm running on an Intel Core i7-2620M CPU, the FPGA-based hardware system can achieve up to 2.66×10(3) speedup in doing model parameters estimation and 698.84 speedup in doing model output prediction. The proposed hardware platform will facilitate research on the highly nonlinear neural process of the mammal brain, and the cognitive neural prosthesis design.

A dual mode FPGA design for the hippocampal prosthesis.

One important step towards the cognitive neural prosthesis design is to achieve real-time prediction of neuronal firing pattern. An FPGA-based hardware computational platform is designed to guarantee this hard real-time signal processing requirement. The proposed platform can work in dual modes: generalized Laguerre-Volterra model parameters estimation and output prediction, and can switch between these two important system functions. Compared with the traditional software-based platform implemented in C, the hardware platform achieves better efficiency in doing the biocomputations by up to thousandfold speedup in this process.

A hardware-based computational platform for Generalized Laguerre-Volterra MIMO model for neural activities.

A parallelized and pipelined architecture based on FPGA and a higher-level Self Reconfiguration Platform are proposed in this paper to model Generalized Laguerre-Volterra MIMO system essential in identifying the time-varying neural dynamics underlying spike activities. Our proposed design is based on the Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA platform and the processing core can produce data samples at a speed of 1.33 × 10(6)/s, which is 3.1 × 10(3) times faster than the corresponding C model running on an Intel i7-860 Quad Core Processor. The ongoing work of the construction of the advanced Self Reconfiguration Platform is presented and initial test results are provided.

Protein structure change studied by hydrogen-deuterium exchange, functional labeling, and mass spectrometry.

An automated high-throughput, high-resolution deuterium exchange HPLC-MS method (DXMS) was used to extend previous hydrogen exchange studies on the position and energetic role of regulatory structure changes in hemoglobin. The results match earlier highly accurate but much more limited tritium exchange results, extend the analysis to the entire sequence of both hemoglobin subunits, and identify some energetically important changes. Allosterically sensitive amide hydrogens located at near amino acid resolution help to confirm the reality of local unfolding reactions and their use to evaluate resolved structure changes in terms of allosteric free energy.