Shared-Scale Predictive Benchmarking of an Acoustic-Radiation-Force Model for Frequency-Dependent Retinal Ganglion Cell Responses

Retinal responses to ultrasound depend on carrier frequency, but whether a constrained tissue-to-neuron model can predict this dependence on a common published response scale remains unclear. We developed an acoustic-radiation-force (ARF) modelling workflow that couples an effective tissue-scale stress proxy to a stochastic Hodgkin–Huxley retinal ganglion cell population. One non-negative affine observation model, shared across frequencies, linked raw simulated spike counts to the published three-frequency ex vivo RGC response scale without frequency-specific rescaling. In a nested leave-one-frequency-out model-selection assessment, the workflow achieved an overall Q2 of 0.915 and an RMSE of 0.0752 across 25 held-out observations. Mean-response transfer remained strong across frequencies, although probabilistic calibration was weakest at 1.9 MHz. An in-sample fixed-map sensitivity analysis using moment-matched log-normal, Gamma, and Weibull thresholds yielded overall RMSEs of 0.0434–0.0461 and preserved positive overall K-ablation NLPD differences of 0.219–0.238, with the effect concentrated at 43 MHz. These results show that shared-scale modelling captures the main cross-frequency response structure and that a high-threshold inhibitory functional component improves the description of high-intensity rolloff. Within the published three-frequency dataset, the workflow provides a reproducible benchmark for targeted comparisons of retinal ultrasound mechanisms.