Musca domestica lamina monopolar cell response to visual stimuli and their contribution to early motion detection

This paper examines the visual stimuli, recording methods, and cell identification techniques used to gather visual information from the household fly, Musca domestica. Visual information from the pre-processing layers of the household fly are explored in order to advance a biomimetic sensor that requires analog pre-processing prior to computational algorithms that mimic the higher level visual processing that occurs in the deeper optic lobes of the fly. The fly is stimulated with a series of primitives created by a green laser stimulus. The primitives are a line, bar, and a spot. The recorded neuron is then identified through cell staining techniques and microscope visualization. With the availability of numerous anatomical drawings on the structure of the fly's optic lobes, it will be easy to identify the stained neuron. With this information models will be constructed to determine the processing performed by the lamina monopolar neurons and their relationship to one another.