Spike sorting: the overlapping spikes challenge

Abstract

When recording action potentials (spikes) from many neurons simultaneously via multichannel micro-electrodes the overlapping of spikes from different neurons is a demanding problem for detection and classifi-cation of spikes (spike sorting). Since multichannel electrodes provide better possibilities to separate the superimposed waveforms, we refined an algorithm for separation of overlapping spikes for the use on multichannel recordings and tested it on simulated data with different numbers of signal channels and with several signal parameters. We show that the larger the number of signal channels the better the separation that may be achieved, especially under demanding recording conditions.

Keywords

• neural activity
• extracellular recordings
• multi-channel electrodes
• action potential
• overlapping spikes
• source separation