A Novel and Simple Spike Sorting Implementation

Abstract

Monitoring the activity of multiple, individual neurons that fire spikes in the vicinity of an electrode, namely perform a Spike Sorting (SS) procedure, comprises one of the most important tools for contemporary neuroscience in order to reverse-engineer the brain. As recording electrodes' technology rabidly evolves by integrating thousands of electrodes in a confined spatial setting, the algorithms that are used to monitor individual neurons from recorded signals have to become even more reliable and computationally efficient. In this work, we propose a novel framework of the SS approach in which a single-step processing of the raw (unfiltered) extracellular signal is sufficient for both the detection and sorting of the activity of individual neurons. Despite its simplicity, the proposed approach exhibits comparable performance with state-of-the-art approaches, especially for spike detection in noisy signals, and paves the way for a new family of SS algorithms with the potential for multi-recording, fast, on-chip implementations.