Information capacity of vesicle release in neuro-spike communication

Abstract

Information transmission in the nervous system is performed through the propagation of spikes among neurons, which is done by vesicle release to chemical synapses. Understanding the fundamentals of this communication can lead to the implementation of bio-inspired nanoscale communication paradigms. In this letter, we utilize a realistic pool-based model for vesicle release and replenishment in hippocampal pyramidal neurons and evaluate the capacity of information transmission in this process by modeling it as a binary channel with memory. Then, we derive a recurrence relation for the number of available vesicles, which is used to find successful bit transmission probabilities and mutual information between input and output. Finally, we evaluate the spiking probability that maximizes mutual information and derive the capacity of the channel.