BME 4900 Final Report - Biomedical Engineering - University of ...

2 BME 4900 Final ReportTeam 81.2 Project PurposeThe device will be an electronic circuit that mimics the timing and synchrony ofthe neuronal populations involved in the execution of horizontal saccades. The signalsfrom each neuron center will be observable and recordable. Such a device will be avaluable tool to enhance the understanding of this, and similar, neural networks. Thisdevice could also serve as an input to a robot that must exhibit realistic eye movements.Finally, this product would potentially be a component of a future project that diagnosesmild traumatic brain injuries.This project would culminate in a device that couldobserve a patient’s eye movements and compare them to those of an ideal, uninjuredmodel, to detect the presence of an injury. This product would serve as the referencemodel of the neural network.1.3 Previous Work Done by OthersIn 1952, Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley described an empirical model thatexplains the propagation of action potentials though the behavior of ion channels in thecell membrane. It comprises many differential equations which may be evaluated with anumerical approach, and yield a voltage-versus-time plot of an action potential, whichcan be seen in figure 2. There are parameters that can be changed to yield plots thatapproximate action potentials of neurons with different properties, such as the firing rateand refractory period.Much work has been done since in modeling neuron behavior. In 1961, RichardFitzHugh and J. Nagumo, et al. developed the FitzHugh-Nagumo model, a simplifiedversion of the Hodgkin-Huxley model. It is important because it retains accuracy despiteits simplicity, and it is better suited for implementation in circuitry.More recently, in 1995, a model of the excitatory burst neuron (EBN) was createdby Enderle (Enderle and Zhou, 2010). It was based on the Hodgkin-Huxley model, but