ICING - Interactive Channel INsertion Gui

Once the channel models and the morphology are available, the bulk of the work in specifying a complex neuron model is to relate the two together by specifying how the channels are distributed over the structure.

In order to simplify this process, PSICS includes a interactive tool, ICING, to define and edit channel distributions. In practice this means creating or editing the corresponding CellProperties file in conjunction with a particular CellMorphology file. All the features allowed in the cell properties file are accessible from the ICING gui.

Principles

Icing operates on a folder of model components, not on a single file like a text editor. This matches the suggested organisation of a PSICS model, where the components needed for a particualr set of models are stored in a single folder but can be combined in different ways by setting up alternative main model configuration files.

On opening a folder, ICING shows the contents categorised by component type in the left pane. Although it will list all the components of the model, version one can only visualize and edit the morphology ("CellMorphology") and membrane properties ("CellProperties") components.

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