Modelling thalamocortical circuitry shows visually induced LTP changes laminar connectivity in human visual cortex

Abstract

Neuroplasticity is essential to learning and memory in the brain; it has therefore also been implicated in numerous neurological and psychiatric disorders, making measuring the state of neuroplasticity of foremost importance to clinical neuroscience. Long-term potentiation (LTP) is a key mechanism of neuroplasticity and has been studied extensively, and invasively in non-human animals. Translation to human application largely relies on the validation of non-invasive measures of LTP. The current study provides validation for the use of a thalamocortical computational model of visual cortex for investigating and replicating interlaminar connectivity changes using non-invasive EEG recording of humans, and a commonly used visual sensory LTP paradigm. The model demonstrated remarkable accuracy recapitulating post-tetanus changes including increased excitatory connectivity from thalamus to layer IV and from layer IV to II/III. The findings also further validate visual sensory induced LTP and evoked potential modulation for measuring of the state of LTP in cortex.

Laminar Neural Dynamics of Auditory Evoked Responses: Computational Modeling of Local Field Potentials in Auditory Cortex of Non-Human Primates

“…Invasive studies in animal models can contribute substantially to this aim by allowing the recording/imaging of layer-specific local field potentials (LFP) and cell-type specific neural firing (see Sections 1.1 and 1.2). Such animal model studies have already provided considerable information about lamina-specific neural activity (Bruyns-Haylett et al, 2017; Hajizadeh et al, 2019, 2021, 2022; Kohl et al, 2022; Neymotin et al, 2020; Sumner et al, 2021) and enhanced our understanding of the functional roles of various types of inhibitory interneurons in cortical processing (Aponte et al, 2021; Blackwell & Geffen, 2017; Liu et al, 2019; Liu & Kanold, 2021; Studer & Barkat, 2022). However, to more thoroughly elucidate the underlying neural generators of evoked responses and their relationship with information processing in the brain, it is necessary to mechanistically link together the available information about cell types and local neuronal circuits in the brain, intracranially-recorded LFPs, and extracranially-measured EEG and MEG signals.…”