A novel digital circuit for astrocyte-inspired stimulator to desynchronize two coupled oscillators

Abstract

Pathophysiologic neural synchronization is a sign of several neurological disorders such as parkinson and epilepsy. In addition, based on established neurophysiologic findings, astrocytes (more type of glial cells) regulate dynamically the synaptic transmission and have key roles in stabilizing neural synchronization. Therefore, in the present study, a new model for digital astrocyte-inspired stimulator is proposed and constructed to break the synchronous oscillations of a minimal network. The minimal network is composed of two Hopf oscillators connected via gap-junction. The complete digital circuit of the closed loop system that is the proposed astrocyte-inspired stimulator and the coupled Hopf oscillators are implemented in hardware on the ZedBoard development kit. The results of MATLAB, ModelSim simulations and FPGA implementations confirm that the digital proposed astrocyte-inspired stimulator can effectively desynchronize the synchronous oscillations of the coupled Hopf oscillator with a demand-controlled characteristic. In this way, the designed digital stimulator not only does not suppress oscillator natural features but also it successfully maintains the desired asynchronous activity.