Dear all, the next seminar will take place on Wednesday, please see the details below. We look forward to seeing you all! Title:  Computational methods for prosthetic vision: inferring functional structure of the brain from its spontaneous activity Speaker:  Karolína Korvasová (Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics) Date and time: Wednesday 10/04/2024 - 17:20 Location: MFF UK, Malostranské nám. 25, lecture hall S4 https://bioinformatics.cuni.cz/seminar/ Best wishes, Petr Danecek ------------------------------- * Karolína Korvasová* (Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics) */Computational methods for prosthetic vision: inferring functional structure of the brain from its spontaneous activity/* Being able to infer the functional structure of cortical neural networks from their spontaneous activity would advance our understanding of neural dynamics and have important applications in the field of visual prosthetics, as functional properties of neurons in the visual cortex cannot be measured directly in blind subjects. We designed a method that estimates the structure of the orientation preference map in the primary visual cortex. Using this method, we were able to show that functional, as well as spatial properties of the sites stimulated with a cortical visual prosthesis in blind humans determine the perceptual outcome. In this talk I will first introduce some basic concepts of computational neuroscience and discuss how biological neural networks can be modeled. Next, I will briefly present a large-scale model of the primary visual cortex developed in the group of Ján Antolík (MFF UK) that was used to design the method that infers functional structure from spontaneous activity. Finally, I will show the results of this method applied to electrophysiological recordings from the visual cortex of sighted non-human primates and blind human volunteers.