AUTHOR=Vich Catalina , Berg Rune W. , Guillamon Antoni , Ditlevsen Susanne 

TITLE=Estimation of Synaptic Conductances in Presence of Nonlinear Effects Caused by Subthreshold Ionic Currents

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience

VOLUME=11

YEAR=2017

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/computational-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fncom.2017.00069

DOI=10.3389/fncom.2017.00069

ISSN=1662-5188

ABSTRACT=<p>Subthreshold fluctuations in neuronal membrane potential traces contain nonlinear components, and employing nonlinear models might improve the statistical inference. We propose a new strategy to estimate synaptic conductances, which has been tested using <italic>in silico</italic> data and applied to <italic>in vivo</italic> recordings. The model is constructed to capture the nonlinearities caused by subthreshold activated currents, and the estimation procedure can discern between excitatory and inhibitory conductances using only one membrane potential trace. More precisely, we perform second order approximations of biophysical models to capture the subthreshold nonlinearities, resulting in quadratic integrate-and-fire models, and apply approximate maximum likelihood estimation where we only suppose that conductances are stationary in a 50–100 ms time window. The results show an improvement compared to existent procedures for the models tested here.</p>