Pulse trains to percepts: A virtual patient describing the perceptual effects of human visual cortical stimulation

The field of cortical sight restoration prostheses is making rapid progress with three clinical trials of visual cortical prostheses underway. However, as yet, we have only limited insight into the perceptual experiences produced by these implants. Here we describe a computational model or 'virtual patient', based on the neurophysiological architecture of V1, which successfully predicts the perceptual experience of participants across a wide range of previously published cortical stimulation studies describing the location, size, brightness and spatiotemporal shape of electrically induced percepts in humans. Our simulations suggest that, in the foreseeable future the perceptual quality of cortical prosthetic devices is likely to be limited by the neurophysiological organization of visual cortex, rather than engineering constraints.