Modeling impairment of ionic regulation with extended Adaptive Exponential integrate-and-fire models.

Abstract

To model the dynamics of neuron membrane excitability many models can be considered, from the most biophysically detailed to the highest level of phenomenological description. Recent works at the single neuron level have shown the importance of taking into account the evolution of slow variables such as ionic concentration. A reduction of such a model to models of the integrate-and-fire family is interesting to then go to large network models. In this paper, we introduce a way to consider the impairment of ionic regulation by adding a third, slow, variable to the adaptive Exponential integrate-and-fire model (AdEx). We then implement and simulate a network including this model. We find that this network was able to generate normal and epileptic discharges. This model should be useful for the design of network simulations of normal and pathological states.