We have seen in the previous post that the distribution of membrane potentials among silent neurons sampled using a random perturbation around regular grid is a multimodal distribution, shown below:
There are two main peaks: the tall peak centered around -50mV and the broad bimodal region from about -25mV to -10mV. There is also a small bump, only visible in the log plot (in red) from about -40mV to -25mV. Looking more carefully, we can refine these boundary potentials to -18mv, -31mV, and -42mV and use this to define a color map.
Here is the color map we use (move the slider to view the colors at the far right):
This example also shows how we use convert perturbed grid data into ndvis coordinates, a better approach would be to precompute the integer coordinates (using round) and use those to create a model number which we could index over. This would allow for more rapid access to the data since we wouldn't have to call "round" eight times for each pixel.
Here is the ndvis image for this color map with the "standard" projection na-cat-cas-a for x and kca-kd-h-leak for y:
Some ObservationsOne thing we see immediately from this picture is that the four regions which were defined by their membrane potential ranges all lie in different regions of parameters space. Lets let D1,D2,D3,D4 represent the four different kinds of silent neurons we have identified according to their membrane potential:
- D1: -18mV to 2mV, orange
- D2: -31mV to -18mV, blue
- D3: -42mV to -31mV, aqua
- D4: -63mV to -42mV, green
These domains are defined by neuron model properties. What we have observed is that these domains also map nicely to four regions:
The orange domain D1 (-18mV to 2mV) is concentrated in the region R1 which is the bottom row of each cell in the bottom row of the image, that is, in the region KCa=Kd=0 and it seems a little more dense in the subregions where CaT is large.
The blue domain (-31mV to -18mV) is in the region R2 which is mainly in the lower left cell, where Na=KCa=0, but it seems to extend with linear drop off into NA=1,KCa=0 and NA=1,KCa=1 but concentrated in all cases in the subregion where CaT >=3.
Observe that the blue and orange domains seem to intermix in the intersection of their corresponding regions (R1 and R2) - the two cells on the bottom left with the blue encroaching on the orange region. These two domains are also not cleanly separated in their voltage distributions as they are the two halves of a bimodal distribution. This would lead one to hypothesize that the perhaps the domains ought to defined by a combination of neuron properties and parameter properties. Perhaps there is something fundamentally different about the silent neurons in regions R1 and R2.
The small aqua region is concentrated in the region R3 which is in the lower left corner (Na=KCa=0) and in that
grid cell it is mostly in the upper right (Kd large, CaT small).
The green region can be better visualized with the following dimension order: cas-a-na-h for x and cat-leak-kd-kca for y, as seen in the following image:
This clearly has a "linear" appearance to is and in a later post we will derive a formula for the boundary as a simple hyperplane.
As a final note, let us compare the image we have just analyzed with the image we get when we apply a similar color map to the data from exp1 which used a non-perturbed regularly spaced grid. The non-perturbed data has more peaks in its distribution and these are mostly represented by the red pixels which don't appear in the image from exp3.
Observe that we have roughly the same regions (the green, blue, and orange) which are roughly in the same locations but the perturbed sampling produces an image with a wider range of densities. The non-perturbed has larger solid color bars. We can interpret the densities in the perturbed sampling image as indicating how many neurons have the property of interest in a particular interval represented by that grid cell. If the density is low then that might mean that the region is concentrated in only one small part of the paramter space represented by that grid.
In future posts we will try to find more precise formulas defining the regions R1,R2,R3,R4 of parameter space that correspond to the domains D1,D2,D3,D4 of silent neurson classified by ranges of membrane potentials. We will also look at the behavior of active neurons near the boundaries of these regions.