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Vision involves both the eye and the brain working together. The eye captures visual information, while the brain processes it. Information travels from the retina to the occipital cortex through the optic nerves and the visual pathway. Instead of presenting a direct image, the retina converts light into electrical signals through photoreceptor cells. The primary visual cortex (V1) then transmits this visual information to higher areas of the brain. When V1 or its connections are damaged, often by strokes, it can lead to cortical blindness. Despite the high occurrence of visual impairments following a stroke, research shows that visual neuroplasticity can help recover vision through targeted training.
This study explores the modeling of receptive fields within a healthy, retinotopically mapped neural population in the V1 visual cortex. It introduces a lesion and proposes a plastic restoration model that orchestrates the expansion of receptive fields to recover functionality in the perilesional V1 cortex. During this process, the initially modeled two-dimensional Gaussian receptive fields become asymmetric, undergoing rotation and expansion towards the lesion. To assess cortical functionality, the output from these receptive fields is integrated with a population of spiking neurons using the Izhikevich framework to generate membrane potentials. These potentials are analyzed using an information theory approach that considers signal causality through ordinal pattern analysis. The primary objective is to elucidate the role of receptive fields expansion in restoring cortical functionality after a lesion, providing insights into modeling mechanisms for plasticity in the visual cortex.