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Updated: Aug 11, 2026

Vibrodissociation of Neurons from Rodent Brain Slices to Study Synaptic Transmission and Image Presynaptic Terminals
Published on: May 25, 2011
The optimal synapse for sparse, binary signals in the rod pathway
Paul T Clark1, Mark C W van Rossum
1Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation, School of Informatics, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK. s9905130@sms.ed.ac.uk
Abstract:
The sparsity of photons at very low light levels necessitates a nonlinear synaptic transfer function between the rod photoreceptors and the rod-bipolar cells. We examine different ways to characterize the performance of the pathway: the error rate, two variants of the mutual information, and the signal-to-noise ratio. Simulation of the pathway shows that these approaches yield substantially different performance at very low light levels and that maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio yields the best performance when judged from simulated images. The results are compared to recent data.
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