scholarly journals Spike sorting for large, dense electrode arrays

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 634-641 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cyrille Rossant ◽  
Shabnam N Kadir ◽  
Dan F M Goodman ◽  
John Schulman ◽  
Maximilian L D Hunter ◽  
...  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
JinHyung Lee ◽  
David Carlson ◽  
Hooshmand Shokri ◽  
Weichi Yao ◽  
Georges Goetz ◽  
...  

AbstractSpike sorting is a critical first step in extracting neural signals from large-scale electrophysiological data. This manuscript describes an efficient, reliable pipeline for spike sorting on dense multi-electrode arrays (MEAs), where neural signals appear across many electrodes and spike sorting currently represents a major computational bottleneck. We present several new techniques that make dense MEA spike sorting more robust and scalable. Our pipeline is based on an efficient multi-stage “triage-then-cluster-then-pursuit” approach that initially extracts only clean, high-quality waveforms from the electrophysiological time series by temporarily skipping noisy or “collided” events (representing two neurons firing synchronously). This is accomplished by developing a neural network detection method followed by efficient outlier triaging. The clean waveforms are then used to infer the set of neural spike waveform templates through nonparametric Bayesian clustering. Our clustering approach adapts a “coreset” approach for data reduction and uses efficient inference methods in a Dirichlet process mixture model framework to dramatically improve the scalability and reliability of the entire pipeline. The “triaged” waveforms are then finally recovered with matching-pursuit deconvolution techniques. The proposed methods improve on the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy and stability on both real and biophysically-realistic simulated MEA data. Furthermore, the proposed pipeline is efficient, learning templates and clustering much faster than real-time for a ≃ 500-electrode dataset, using primarily a single CPU core.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gonzalo E. Mena ◽  
Lauren E. Grosberg ◽  
Sasidhar Madugula ◽  
Paweł Hottowy ◽  
Alan Litke ◽  
...  

AbstractSimultaneous electrical stimulation and recording using multi-electrode arrays can provide a valuable technique for studying circuit connectivity and engineering neural interfaces. However, interpreting these measurements is challenging because the spike sorting process (identifying and segregating action potentials arising from different neurons) is greatly complicated by electrical stimulation artifacts across the array, which can exhibit complex and nonlinear waveforms, and overlap temporarily with evoked spikes. Here we develop a scalable algorithm based on a structured Gaussian Process model to estimate the artifact and identify evoked spikes. The effectiveness of our methods is demonstrated in both real and simulated 512-electrode recordings in the peripheral primate retina with single-electrode and several types of multi-electrode stimulation. We establish small error rates in the identification of evoked spikes, with a computational complexity that is compatible with real-time data analysis. This technology may be helpful in the design of future high-resolution sensory prostheses based on tailored stimulation (e.g., retinal prostheses), and for closed-loop neural stimulation at a much larger scale than currently possible.Author SummarySimultaneous electrical stimulation and recording using multi-electrode arrays can provide a valuable technique for studying circuit connectivity and engineering neural interfaces. However, interpreting these recordings is challenging because the spike sorting process (identifying and segregating action potentials arising from different neurons) is largely stymied by electrical stimulation artifacts across the array, which are typically larger than the signals of interest. We develop a novel computational framework to estimate and subtract away this contaminating artifact, enabling the large-scale analysis of responses of possibly hundreds of cells to tailored stimulation. Importantly, we suggest that this technology may also be helpful for the development of future high-resolution neural prosthetic devices (e.g., retinal prostheses).


2020 ◽  
pp. 529-536
Author(s):  
O KLEMPÍŘ ◽  
R KRUPIČKA ◽  
J KRŮŠEK ◽  
I DITTERT ◽  
V PETRÁKOVÁ ◽  
...  

In this work we report on the implementation of methods for data processing signals from microelectrode arrays (MEA) and the application of these methods for signals originated from two types of MEAs to detect putative neurons and sort them into subpopulations. We recorded electrical signals from firing neurons using titanium nitride (TiN) and boron doped diamond (BDD) MEAs. In previous research, we have shown that these methods have the capacity to detect neurons using commercially-available TiN-MEAs. We have managed to cultivate and record hippocampal neurons for the first time using a newly developed custom-made multichannel BDD-MEA with 20 recording sites. We have analysed the signals with the algorithms developed and employed them to inspect firing bursts and enable spike sorting. We did not observe any significant difference between BDD- and TiN-MEAs over the parameters, which estimated spike shape variability per each detected neuron. This result supports the hypothesis that we have detected real neurons, rather than noise, in the BDD-MEA signal. BDD materials with suitable mechanical, electrical and biocompatibility properties have a large potential in novel therapies for treatments of neural pathologies, such as deep brain stimulation in Parkinson’s disease.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keming Chen ◽  
Yangtao Jiang ◽  
Zhanxiong Wu ◽  
Nenggan Zheng ◽  
Haochuan Wang ◽  
...  

Spike sorting is used to classify the spikes (action potentials acquired by physiological electrodes), aiming to identify their respective firing units. Now it has been developed to classify the spikes recorded by multi-electrode arrays (MEAs), with the improvement of micro-electrode technology. However, how to improve classification accuracy and maintain low time complexity simultaneously becomes a difficulty. A fast and accurate spike sorting approach named HTsort is proposed for high-density multi-electrode arrays in this paper. Several improvements have been introduced to the traditional pipeline that is composed of threshold detection and clustering method. First, the divide-and-conquer method is employed to utilize electrode spatial information to achieve pre-clustering. Second, the clustering method HDBSCAN (hierarchical density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise) is used to classify spikes and detect overlapping events (multiple spikes firing simultaneously). Third, the template merging method is used to merge redundant exported templates according to the template similarity and the spatial distribution of electrodes. Finally, the template matching method is used to resolve overlapping events. Our approach is validated on simulation data constructed by ourselves and publicly available data and compared to other state-of-the-art spike sorters. We found that the proposed HTsort has a more favorable trade-off between accuracy and time consumption. Compared with MountainSort and SpykingCircus, the time consumption is reduced by at least 40% when the number of electrodes is 64 and below. Compared with HerdingSpikes, the classification accuracy can typically improve by more than 10%. Meanwhile, HTsort exhibits stronger robustness against background noise than other sorters. Our more sophisticated spike sorter would facilitate neurophysiologists to complete spike sorting more quickly and accurately.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Yger ◽  
Giulia L.B. Spampinato ◽  
Elric Esposito ◽  
Baptiste Lefebvre ◽  
Stéphane Deny ◽  
...  

AbstractUnderstanding how assemblies of neurons encode information requires recording large populations of cells in the brain. In recent years, multi-electrode arrays and large silicon probes have been developed to record simultaneously from hundreds or thousands of electrodes packed with a high density. However, these new devices challenge the classical way to do spike sorting. Here we developed a new method to solve these issues, based on a highly automated algorithm to extract spikes from extracellular data, and show that this algorithm reached near optimal performance both in vitro and in vivo. The algorithm is composed of two main steps: 1) a “template-finding” phase to extract the cell templates, i.e. the pattern of activity evoked over many electrodes when one neuron fires an action potential; 2) a “template-matching” phase where the templates were matched to the raw data to find the location of the spikes. The manual intervention by the user was reduced to the minimal, and the time spent on manual curation did not scale with the number of electrodes. We tested our algorithm with large-scale data from in vitro and in vivo recordings, from 32 to 4225 electrodes. We performed simultaneous extracellular and patch recordings to obtain “ground truth” data, i.e. cases where the solution to the sorting problem is at least partially known. The performance of our algorithm was always close to the best expected performance. We thus provide a general solution to sort spikes from large-scale extracellular recordings.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marius Pachitariu ◽  
Nicholas Steinmetz ◽  
Shabnam Kadir ◽  
Matteo Carandini ◽  
Harris Kenneth D.

AbstractAdvances in silicon probe technology mean that in vivo electrophysiological recordings from hundreds of channels will soon become commonplace. To interpret these recordings we need fast, scalable and accurate methods for spike sorting, whose output requires minimal time for manual curation. Here we introduce Kilosort, a spike sorting framework that meets these criteria, and show that it allows rapid and accurate sorting of large-scale in vivo data. Kilosort models the recorded voltage as a sum of template waveforms triggered on the spike times, allowing overlapping spikes to be identified and resolved. Rapid processing is achieved thanks to a novel low-dimensional approximation for the spatiotemporal distribution of each template, and to batch-based optimization on GPUs. A novel post-clustering merging step based on the continuity of the templates substantially reduces the requirement for subsequent manual curation operations. We compare Kilosort to an established algorithm on data obtained from 384-channel electrodes, and show superior performance, at much reduced processing times. Data from 384-channel electrode arrays can be processed in approximately realtime. Kilosort is an important step towards fully automated spike sorting of multichannel electrode recordings, and is freely available (github.com/cortex-lab/Kilosort).


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cyrille Rossant ◽  
Shabnam N Kadir ◽  
Dan F. M. Goodman ◽  
John Schulman ◽  
Mariano Belluscio ◽  
...  

Developments in microfabrication technology have enabled the production of neural electrode arrays with hundreds of closely-spaced recording sites, and electrodes with thousands of sites are currently under development. These probes will in principle allow the simultaneous recording of very large numbers of neurons. However, use of this technology requires the development of techniques for decoding the spike times of the recorded neurons, from the raw data captured from the probes. There currently exists no practical solution to this problem of “spike sorting” for large, dense electrode arrays. Here, we present a set of novel tools to solve this problem, implemented in a suite of practical, user-friendly, open-source software. We validate these methods on data from rat cortex, demonstrating error rates as low as 5%.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Garcia ◽  
Julia Sprenger ◽  
Tahl Holtzman ◽  
Alessio Buccino

Recording neuronal activity with penetrating extracellular multi-channel electrode arrays, more commonly known as neural probes, is one of the most widespread approaches to probe neuronal activity. Despite a plethora of available extracellular probe designs, the time-consuming process of mapping of electrode channel order and relative geometries, as required by spike-sorting software is invariably left to the end-user. Consequently, this manual process is prone to mis-mapping mistakes, which in turn lead to undesirable spike-sorting errors and inefficiencies.Here we introduce ProbeInterface, an open-source project that aims to unify neural probe metadata descriptions by removing the manual step of probe mapping prior to spike-sorting for the analysis of extracellular neural recordings. ProbeInterface is first of all a Python API, which enables users to create and visualize probes and probe groups at any required complexity level. Second, ProbeInterface facilitates the generation of comprehensive wiring description ina reproducible fashion for any specific data-acquisition setup, which usually involves the use of a recording probe, a headstage, adapters, and an acquisition system. Third, we collaborate with probe manufacturers to compile an open library of available probes, which can be downloaded at run time using our Python API. Finally, with ProbeInterface we define a file format for probe handling which includes all necessary information for a FAIR probe description and is compatiblewith and complementary to other open standards in neuroscience.


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