The present focus of my work is the inference of material properties from electrical and optical recordings from single nerve cells. The sought after material properties are membrane capacitance and axial resistance, ion channel conductance, kinetics and distribution and synaptic location and time course.

Model Data Base at SenseLab
Neurosciences at Rice
Computational Neuroscience Journal Club
Theoretical Neuroscience Houston

NLFEM

This is a Matlab tool developed by Steve Cox and Jay Raol that
  1. Converts a Neurolucida tracing into a matlab structure
  2. Assembles finite element stiffness and mass matrices
  3. Assigns passive membrane properties and computes the potential arising from somatic current injection.
  4. Displays the potential at any desired location.
We demonstrate its use on this cell from rat entorhinal cortex courtesy of Mala Shah.
This cell was traced by Colin Cox at Rice. The resulting Neurolucida file is here .
We process this file in Matlab following this diary assuming these cell, stimulus and grid parameters.
We then select four locations at which we view the associated potentials.

The actual software comes in four chunks.

  1. The converter,
  2. the assembler,
  3. the solver, and
  4. the viewer.
Here is a bit more detail on The Use of Neurolucida and the The Converter.