From thought to action

Systems engineering is rapidly assuming a prominent role in neuroscience that could unify scientific theories, experimental evidence, and medical development. In this three-part work, I study the neural representation of targets before reaching movements and the generation of prosthetic control signals through stochastic modeling and estimation. In the first part, I show that temporal and history dependence contributes to the representation of targets in the ensemble spiking activity of neurons in primate dorsal premotor cortex (PMd). Point process modeling of target representation suggests that local and possibly also distant neural interactions influence the spiking patterns observed in PMd. In the second part, I draw on results from surveillance theory to reconstruct reaching movements from neural activity related to the desired target and the path to that target. This approach combines movement planning and execution to surpass estimation with either target or path related neural activity alone. In the third part, I describe the principled design of brain-driven neural prosthetic devices as a filtering problem on interacting discrete and continuous random processes. This framework subsumes four canonical Bayesian approaches and supports emerging applications to neural prosthetic devices.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Srinivasan, Lakshminarayan, 1981-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Emery N. Brown and Sanjoy K. Mitter.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38318

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38318