Hardware design of the cortical-diencephalic centre of the lower urinary tract neuroregulator system

Abstract

The neuroregulator system in humans controls organ and system functioning. This system comprises a set of neural centres that are distributed along the spinal cord and act independently together with their nerve interconnections. The centres involved in this task were isolated in previous studies through investigations of the functioning and composition of the neuroregulator system of the lower urinary tract to elucidate their individual performances and enable the creation of a general neuroregulator system model capable of operating at the neuronal level. Although the long-term goal of our research is the development of a system on chip (SoC) capable of behaving as a fully programmable neuroregulator system, this work is another step in which we test the viability of the hardware design of one of these neuroregulator centres (specifically the cortical-diencephalic centre) to achieve a first prototype and architectural proposal. To this end, the behaviour of this centre has been isolated, a hardware design implemented on FPGA has been proposed to create a prototype, a simulation environment has been built for the evaluation, and finally, the results have been analysed. This system verified that the functional behaviour corresponded to the expected behaviour in humans and that the operational requirements for the implementation were technically and architecturally viable.

Keywords: Cortical diencephalic centre; FPGA; Hardware design; Neuroregulator system.