Design of Charge-Balanced Time-Optimal Stimuli for Spiking Neuron Oscillators

TL;DR

This paper develops charge-balanced, time-optimal control strategies for neuron oscillators to precisely manipulate inter-spike intervals without net charge transfer, applicable to various neuron models including Hodgkin-Huxley.

Contribution

It introduces a general framework for designing charge-balanced, time-optimal stimuli for neuron oscillators, valid for arbitrary phase response curves and control bounds.

Findings

Derived explicit control laws for minimum and maximum inter-spike times.

Validated control strategies on both idealized and experimental neuron models.

Characterized how control structure varies with amplitude constraints.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the fundamental limits on how the inter- spike time of a neuron oscillator can be perturbed by the application of a bounded external control input (a current stimulus) with zero net electric charge accumulation. We use phase models to study the dynamics of neurons and derive charge-balanced controls that achieve the minimum and maximum inter-spike times for a given bound on the control amplitude. Our derivation is valid for any arbitrary shape of the phase response curve and for any value of the given control amplitude bound. In addition, we characterize the change in the structures of the charge-balanced time-optimal controls with the allowable control amplitude. We demonstrate the applicability of the derived optimal control laws by applying them to mathematically ideal and experimentally observed neuron phase models, including the widely-studied Hodgkin-Huxley phase model, and by verifying them with the corresponding original full state-space models. This work addresses a fundamental problem in the field of neural control and provides a theoretical investigation to the optimal control of oscillatory systems.