Tag: MEA

Understanding the spikes of the neurons

What is a neuronal spike? Neuronal spike is an electrical signal generated by a neuron. Neuronal cells have a membrane potential which means that the electric charge (expressed in voltage) is not the same on both side of its membrane. This is due to the difference in ion concentrations on external versus internal side of …

March 4, 2021 Read more

Communication between neurons and external world

Signalling between neurons allows the storage and processing of information. Further, this information can flow to other living tissues or, ex vivo, to devices which are connected to neurons. The understanding of these processes can be used in two main directions: 1. In vivo: To explain how our brains perceives the environment and controls all …

September 23, 2020 Read more

Understanding signal processing between neurons

The ability to form large number of strong connections between neurons in the brain is believed to be one of the crucial factors affecting brain function. This is quite clear, given the fact that our cognitive function depends on effective communication between different neurons. This communication occurs via synapses, which allow electrical or chemical signal transmission …

May 27, 2020 Read more

Towards the increase of computing power

Machine learning tools are being developed for over 70 years, however they started to flourish only over the last 20 years. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that sophisticated algorithms need a potent computing power to be executed. Therefore, we can say that the recent progress in hardware development is one …

March 14, 2020 Read more

Looking for burst signals

One of the most visible features of a functional Biological Neural Network (BNN) is its ability to generate synchronized spikes or burst signals, similar to those observed in living mammal brains.  Once they have reached a sufficient development stage, in particular in terms of connectivity, in vitro neuronal cultures tend to exhibit spontaneous bursts of …

February 4, 2020 Read more

Diversity of biological neural network cultures

The core component of  a Biological Neural Network (BNN) unit is the biological culture of neural cells. There are two main approaches to setup a BNN culture: extracting neurons at early development stage from non-human brains, for instance cortical neurons from postnatal rat brain, or differentiating stem cells such as human induced pluripotent stem cells …

October 4, 2019 Read more

Processing signals from cultured neurons

The signals read from a Biological Neural Network (BNN) unit are complex signals which require dedicated processing. Depending on the MEA spatial density and temporal resolution, gigabits of uncompressed signal data may be generated every minute. While low-scale signal analysis such as identifying the presence or absence of spike bursts may be sufficient for certain …

August 12, 2019 Read more

Reading signals from cultured neurons

From a system automation point of view, a Biological Neural Network (BNN) unit may be seen as an analogue system which can be read, for various analysis and monitoring purposes, through sensors. It may also be commanded (written to) by a diversity of stimulation mechanisms, either chemical, electrical, or even optical. For in vitro BNNs …

May 28, 2019 Read more

The rise of signal processing engineering for in vitro brain cultures

At bioserver.net, our signal processing team cumulates decades of academic and industrial experience in a diversity of information and communication technology fields, ranging from image and video analysis to digital communications, cryptography, and artificial neural networks. The sequential operations of our silicon-based calculators and algorithms, even in their massively parallel implementations, still cannot replicate the …

March 31, 2019 Read more