Integrate-and-fire

A biological neuron model, also known as a spiking neuron model, is a mathematical description of the properties of certain cells in the nervous system that generate sharp electrical potentials across their cell membrane, roughly one millisecond in duration, as shown in Fig. 1. Spiking neurons are known to be a major signaling unit of the nervous system, and for this reason characterizing their operation is of great importance. It is worth noting that not all the cells of the nervous system produce the type of spike that define the scope of the spiking neuron models. For example, cochlear hair cells, retinal receptor cells, and retinal bipolar cells do not spike. Furthermore, many cells in the nervous system are not classified as neurons but instead are classified as glia.

Ultimately, biological neuron models aim to explain the mechanisms underlying the operation of the nervous system for the purpose of restoring lost control capabilities such as perception (e.g. deafness or blindness), motor movement decision making, and continuous limb control. In that sense, biological neural models differ from artificial neuron models that do not presume to predict the outcomes of experiments involving the biological neural tissue (although artificial neuron models are also concerned with execution of perception and estimation tasks). Accordingly, an important aspect of biological neuron models is experimental validation, and the use of physical units to describe the experimental procedure associated with the model predictions.

Neuron models can be divided into two categories according to the physical units of the interface of the model. Each category could be further divided according to the abstraction/detail level:

Although it is not unusual in science and engineering to have several descriptive models for different abstraction/detail levels, the number of different, sometimes contradicting, biological neuron models is exceptionally high. This situation is partly the result of the many different experimental settings, and the difficulty to separate the intrinsic properties of a single neuron from measurements effects and interactions of many cells (network effects). To accelerate the convergence to a unified theory, we list several models in each category, and where applicable, also references to supporting experiments.

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