Closed-loop Feedback Control of Neural Circuits

The advent of optical stimulation techniques has enabled simultaneous stimulation and recording paradigms. By recording electrically and stimulating optically, we are able to ‘close the loop’ by controlling the light stimulus to achieve an arbitrary target state. The development of this closed-loop technology enables causal investigation of otherwise intertwined neural circuit variables. In the first demonstration of this work, a PI controller was used to lock the firing rate of a single neuron to stationary targets (Newman et al. 2015). We have continued to develop these techniques for implementation in the thalamocortical circuit, first with model based design of classical PID control in thalamus of the anesthetized rat (Bolus et al., 2018), and then through state-space based, optimal control strategies in thalamus of the awake, head-fixed mouse (Bolus et al., 2021). 

CLOC

J. P. Newman, M. Fong, D. C. Millard, C. J. Whitmire,  G. B. Stanley, S. M. Potter, Optogenetic feedback control of neuronal firing, eLife, 2015. PDF

M. F. Bolus, A. A. Willats, C. J. Whitmire, C. J. Rozell, G. B. Stanley, Design Strategies for Dynamic Closed-Loop Optogenetic Neurocontrol in vivo, Journal of Neural Engineering 15: 026011, 2018. PDF

M. F. Bolus, A. A. Willats, C. J. Rozell, G. B. Stanley, State-space optimal feedback control of optogenetically driven neural activity, Journal of Neural Engineering, 31;18(3), 2021. PDF