Tobi Delbruck
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Icon for PhysioFriend The Physiologist's Friend Simulator

Downloading, installing, and running PhysioFriend:

What it does

PhysioFriend lets you plot receptive fields of simulated retinal and cortical cells. It is the software analog to the Physio Friend chip. It is intended for classroom demonstration of cell response properties. You can hear the cell responses as though you were doing a recording from a live animal. You can choose between photoreceptor, horizontal cell, on and off bipolar cells, on and off ganglion cells, and several types of cortical cells. You can use bar, edge, or grating stimuli. You will hear how the cell responds as you use your mouse to move the stimulus. The stimulus orientation, contrast, size, spatial frequency can be easily manipulated through the keyboard.

PhysioFriend is 100% written in Java. All you need is the Java run time environment and a sound card--if you want to hear the cells. (If you don't have a sound card, you can still see the cells responses on an activity meter.)

PhysioFriend does a relatively simple-minded simulation of the cells. The intention is not to simulate the beautiful complexity of the visual system, but just to capture some aspects of how the cells seem to respond.

PhysioFriend source code and documentation

The source code is available under the GPL

Requirements:

Quick start

Troubleshooting

News

Authors

PhysioFriend was originally written by Christof Marti and Tobi Delbruck at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, University and ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
Johann Gyger, with consultation from Daniel Kiper, extended it to model color selective retinal cells.

Go to PhysioFriend Home. Go to PhysioFriend Chip.


September 20, 2007
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