Simulation of Large Scale Neural Networks for Evaluation Applications

Abstract

Understanding the complexity of biological neural networks like the human brain is one of the scientific challenges of our century. The organization of the brain can be described at different levels, ranging from small neural networks to entire brain regions. Existing methods for the description of functionally or effective connectivity are based on the analysis of relations between the activities of different neural units by detecting correlations or information flow. This is a crucial step in understanding neural disorders like Alzheimer's disease and their causative factors. To evaluate these estimation methods, it is necessary to refer to a neural network with known connectivity, which is typically unknown for natural biological neural networks. Therefore, network simulations, also in silico, are available. In this work, the in silico simulation of large scale neural networks is established and the influence of different topologies on the generated patterns of neuronal signals is investigated. The goal is to develop standard evaluation methods for neurocomputational algorithms with a realistic large scale model to enable benchmarking and comparability of different studies.