Abstract
The objective of this study is to investigate the response properties of a spherical bushy neuron model in the antero-ventral cochlear nucleus in response to sinusoidally modulated pulsatile electric stimuli using computer simulations. In the computer simulation, we used a single compartment model of the modified Hodgkin-Huxley type consisting of sodium, high- and low-threshold potassium, and cation channels. The pulsatile electric stimuli was applied intra-cellularly to the neuron model, and then the transmembrane potentials were computed using the 4-th order Runge-Kutta method to generate the spike trains. To quantitatively evaluate the response properties, the period histogram was generated and then the vector strength was estimated from the spike trains. The simulation results show that as the modulation depth increases, the vector strength tends to increase, and that a modulation depth greater than 8% can encode information into the spike trains with an appropriate vector strength, like that observed in feline experiments. These results may give an insight into the better design of auditory brain-stem prostheses.
