NEURON Toolbox for MATLAB

:warning: For now, only Windows with MinGW is supported.

The NEURON Toolbox provides a MATLAB API to NEURON, using the MATLAB provided clibgen and clib packages to connect MATLAB and NEURON.

The NEURON simulation environment is used in laboratories and classrooms around the world for building and using computational models of neurons and networks of neurons.

About this toolbox:

• The +neuron package defines the MATLAB API to NEURON. All calls to NEURON from MATLAB should only use methods and properties exposed by the classes in this package and should not directly use clib.neuron. This is because the +neuron package takes care of proper initialization of NEURON, and correct cleanup of NEURON objects.
• With clib, the NEURON shared library can be used through the clibgen generated wrapper interface. The functions and variables exposed in the wrapper interface can be used directly from MATLAB, e.g. it is possible to call the NEURON function nrn_sec_pop from MATLAB with clib.neuron.nrn_sec_pop().
• With clibgen a MATLAB interface to the NEURON library is built. This results in a wrapper shared library. Prebuilt wrappers for certain Operating System and Compiler combinations may be provided.
  • To generate the interface, the underlying library should preferably expose an API in a header file. Since NEURON itself does not provide a C or C++ API that is directly useable in clibgen, the MATLAB-NEURON project also contains header and C++ files that define a C++ API, containing the NEURON functionality that needs to be available from MATLAB.

MATLAB is a registered trademark of The MathWorks, Inc.

For more detailed technical information about e.g. code structure, see doc/DEV_README.md.

Usage

Setup

First, make sure NEURON for Windows is installed (see http://neuron.yale.edu/). Also make sure to set MinGW-w64 as your MEX C++ compiler; for more information about this, run mex -setup cpp in MATLAB.

To get the toolbox working on your machine, run the MATLAB scripts in the following order:

• setup
  • to add the appropriate directories to your path (you might need to change the hardcoded NEURON installation directory)
  • this script needs to be run every time a new MATLAB session is started
• utils.build_interface
  • to build the library interface (neuron/neuronInterface.dll)
  • this script needs to be run only once to generate the library interface, it only needs to be re-run if the interface changes (for example when using a newer Neuron version)
  • please note: you need administrator rights to run build_interface (i.e. you need to run MATLAB as administrator)

Example scripts

A comprehensive example live script, encompassing the smaller examples and providing additional explanation, can be found at examples/example_livescript.mlx.

Smaller example scripts are available at:

• examples/example_run.m
  • to initialize a Neuron session and call some top-level functions from the library
• examples/example_vector.m
  • to create a Vector object and calculate some properties
• examples/example_morph.m
  • to generate a morphology by connecting different Sections, and add 3D points to them
• examples/example_crash.m
  • to cause a :warning: crash by causing a method with the wrong arguments
• examples/example_acpot.m
  • to generate an action potential

example_acpot should result in:

Basic API usage

The main Neuron class can be found at neuron.Neuron. We can initialize a Neuron session by instantiating it:

n = neuron.Neuron();

Now all top-level variables, functions and classes can be accessed using this object. The available variables, functions and classes, as well as their Neuron types can be displayed with:

n.list_functions();

Top-level variables, functions and objects can be called directly. E.g.:

disp(n.t);                  % Display the time
n.fadvance();               % Advance by one timestep
v = n.Vector();             % Create a Vector object

If you create an object like a Vector, you can see a list of its properties and methods with:

v.list_methods();