Use-Dependent Inactivation of the Mouse Visual Cortex in Response to Microstimulation Train

To gain insight for designing efficient neural mi-crostimulation for cortical visual prostheses, we measured the physiological neural responses to the trains of electrical stimulus pulses in the mouse cerebral tissue slices by the voltage-sensitive dye imaging. The experimental results demonstrated that the post-synaptic potential component in the stimulus-induced responses exhibited the use-dependent inactivation, which was able to be simulated by using a Markovian kinetic model. The time course of this inactivation appeared to be consistent with the disappearance of stimulus-induced phosphenes in several hundred milliseconds during the high-frequency train stimulation in the previous clinical study.