Computational Approach to Identifying Contrast-Driven Retinal Ganglion Cells

The retina acts as the primary stage for the encoding of visual stimuli in the central nervous system. It is comprised of numerous functionally distinct cells tuned to particular types of visual stimuli. This work presents an analytical approach to identifying contrast-driven retinal cells. Machine learning approaches as well as traditional regression models are used to represent the input-output behaviour of retinal ganglion cells. The findings of this work demonstrate that it is possible to separate the cells based on how they respond to changes in mean contrast upon presentation of single images. The separation allows us to identify retinal ganglion cells that are likely to have good model performance in a computationally inexpensive way.