Real-Time Prediction of the Unobserved States in Dopamine Neurons on a Reconfigurable FPGA Platform

Real-time prediction of dynamical characteristics of Dopamine (DA) neurons, including properties in ion channels and membrane potentials, is meaningful and critical for the investigation of the dynamical mechanisms of DA cells and the related psychiatric disorders. However, obtaining the unobserved states of DA neurons is significantly challenging. In this paper, we present a real-time prediction system for DA unobserved states on a reconfigurable field-programmable gate array (FPGA). In the presented system, the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is implemented into a DA neuron model for dynamics prediction. We present a modular structure to implement the prediction algorithm and a digital topology to compute the roots of matrices in the UKF implementation. Implementation results show that the proposed system provides the real-time computational ability to predict the DA unobserved states with high precision. Although the presented system is aimed at the state prediction of DA cells, it can also be applied into the dynamic-clamping technique in the electrophysiological experiments, the brain-machine interfaces and the neural control engineering works.