Sorting algorithm

Microelectrode

Software engineering

Chemistry

Programming language

Toolbox

Artificial intelligence

Electrode

Pattern recognition (psychology)

Spike (software development)

Biology

Image (mathematics)

Spike sorting

SIGNAL (programming language)

sort

Biological system

Computer science

Multielectrode array

Noise (video)

Sorting

Algorithm

Information retrieval

Ground truth

Physical chemistry

eLife

In recent years, multielectrode arrays and large silicon probes have been developed to record simultaneously between hundreds and thousands of electrodes packed with a high density. However, they require novel methods to extract the spiking activity of large ensembles of neurons. Here, we developed a new toolbox to sort spikes from these large-scale extracellular data. To validate our method, we performed simultaneous extracellular and loose patch recordings in rodents to obtain 'ground truth' data, where the solution to this sorting problem is known for one cell. The performance of our algorithm was always close to the best expected performance, over a broad range of signal-to-noise ratios, in vitro and in vivo. The algorithm is entirely parallelized and has been successfully tested on recordings with up to 4225 electrodes. Our toolbox thus offers a generic solution to sort accurately spikes for up to thousands of electrodes.

A spike sorting toolbox for up to thousands of electrodes validated with ground truth recordings in vitro and in vivo