Efficient neural spike sorting using data subdivision and unification

PLoS One. 2021 Feb 10;16(2):e0245589. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0245589. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Neural spike sorting is prerequisite to deciphering useful information from electrophysiological data recorded from the brain, in vitro and/or in vivo. Significant advancements in nanotechnology and nanofabrication has enabled neuroscientists and engineers to capture the electrophysiological activities of the brain at very high resolution, data rate and fidelity. However, the evolution in spike sorting algorithms to deal with the aforementioned technological advancement and capability to quantify higher density data sets is somewhat limited. Both supervised and unsupervised clustering algorithms do perform well when the data to quantify is small, however, their efficiency degrades with the increase in the data size in terms of processing time and quality of spike clusters being formed. This makes neural spike sorting an inefficient process to deal with large and dense electrophysiological data recorded from brain. The presented work aims to address this challenge by providing a novel data pre-processing framework, which can enhance the efficiency of the conventional spike sorting algorithms significantly. The proposed framework is validated by applying on ten widely used algorithms and six large feature sets. Feature sets are calculated by employing PCA and Haar wavelet features on three widely adopted large electrophysiological datasets for consistency during the clustering process. A MATLAB software of the proposed mechanism is also developed and provided to assist the researchers, active in this domain.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Action Potentials*
  • Algorithms*
  • Animals
  • Brain / metabolism
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Humans
  • Models, Neurological*
  • Neurons / metabolism
  • Rats
  • Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted*
  • Software*

Grants and funding

The research work is fully supported by Neural and Cognitive Systems Lab at Institute for Intelligent Systems Research and Innovation, Deakin University". Although we do not have any explicit external funding grant linked to this work however the work is internally funded by the lab.