scholarly journals Neural Decoding Using a Parallel Sequential Monte Carlo Method on Point Processes with Ensemble Effect

2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Xu ◽  
Yiwen Wang ◽  
Fang Wang ◽  
Yuxi Liao ◽  
Qiaosheng Zhang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Monte Carlo ◽  
Point Process ◽  
Goodness Of Fit ◽  
Point Processes ◽  
Sequential Monte Carlo ◽  
Neuronal Response ◽  
Position Estimation ◽  
Monte Carlo Algorithm ◽  
Sequential Monte Carlo Method ◽  
Proposed Model

Sequential Monte Carlo estimation on point processes has been successfully applied to predict the movement from neural activity. However, there exist some issues along with this method such as the simplified tuning model and the high computational complexity, which may degenerate the decoding performance of motor brain machine interfaces. In this paper, we adopt a general tuning model which takes recent ensemble activity into account. The goodness-of-fit analysis demonstrates that the proposed model can predict the neuronal response more accurately than the one only depending on kinematics. A new sequential Monte Carlo algorithm based on the proposed model is constructed. The algorithm can significantly reduce the root mean square error of decoding results, which decreases 23.6% in position estimation. In addition, we accelerate the decoding speed by implementing the proposed algorithm in a massive parallel manner on GPU. The results demonstrate that the spike trains can be decoded as point process in real time even with 8000 particles or 300 neurons, which is over 10 times faster than the serial implementation. The main contribution of our work is to enable the sequential Monte Carlo algorithm with point process observation to output the movement estimation much faster and more accurately.

Sequential Monte Carlo Point-Process Estimation of Kinematics from Neural Spiking Activity for Brain-Machine Interfaces

2009 ◽  
Vol 21 (10) ◽  
pp. 2894-2930 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yiwen Wang ◽  
António R. C. Paiva ◽  
José C. Príncipe ◽  
Justin C. Sanchez
Keyword(s):  
Monte Carlo ◽  
Point Process ◽  
Adaptive Filtering ◽  
Point Processes ◽  
Sequential Monte Carlo ◽  
Hand Movement ◽  
Spike Trains ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Brain Machine Interfaces ◽  
Monte Carlo Estimation

Many decoding algorithms for brain machine interfaces' (BMIs) estimate hand movement from binned spike rates, which do not fully exploit the resolution contained in spike timing and may exclude rich neural dynamics from the modeling. More recently, an adaptive filtering method based on a Bayesian approach to reconstruct the neural state from the observed spike times has been proposed. However, it assumes and propagates a gaussian distributed state posterior density, which in general is too restrictive. We have also proposed a sequential Monte Carlo estimation methodology to reconstruct the kinematic states directly from the multichannel spike trains. This letter presents a systematic testing of this algorithm in a simulated neural spike train decoding experiment and then in BMI data. Compared to a point-process adaptive filtering algorithm with a linear observation model and a gaussian approximation (the counterpart for point processes of the Kalman filter), our sequential Monte Carlo estimation methodology exploits a detailed encoding model (tuning function) derived for each neuron from training data. However, this added complexity is translated into higher performance with real data. To deal with the intrinsic spike randomness in online modeling, several synthetic spike trains are generated from the intensity function estimated from the neurons and utilized as extra model inputs in an attempt to decrease the variance in the kinematic predictions. The performance of the sequential Monte Carlo estimation methodology augmented with this synthetic spike input provides improved reconstruction, which raises interesting questions and helps explain the overall modeling requirements better.

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