Electric Stimulation Elicits Heterogeneous Responses in ON but Not OFF Retinal Ganglion Cells to Transmit Rich Neural Information

Retinal implants electrically stimulate surviving retinal neurons to restore vision in people blinded by outer degeneration. Although the healthy retina is known transmit a vast amount of visual information brain, it has not been studied whether prosthetic contains similar information. Here, we assessed neural transmitted population responses arising brisk transient (BT) and sustained (BS) subtypes ON OFF ganglion cells (RGCs) rabbit retina. To correlate response heterogeneity transmission, first quantified cell-to-cell calculating spike time tiling coefficient (STTC) across spiking patterns RGCs each type. Then, computed encoded RGC given In light stimulation, activities were more heterogeneous than (STTCAVG = 0.36, 0.45, 0.77 0.55 for BT, BS, respectively). Interestingly, however, electric both BT BS showed remarkably homogeneous 0.93 0.82 respectively), whereas two slightly increased populational compared light-evoked 0.71 0.63 Consequently, electrically-evoked 15 was substantially lower pathway: only ~23% ~53% their counterparts. Together with previously-reported natural RGCs, higher may make recognizable, eliciting biased percepts bright phosphenes.