[posted to _neurobot blog_ / http://neurobot.bio.auth.gr/]
Extracellular recordings of spontaneous nerve activity is a common
practice for a number of electrophysiological experiments providing
valuable information concerning peripheral and central nervous system
physiology of vertebrates and invertebrates. Extracellular electrodes
record voltage potentials representing the activity of an unknown number
of activated neural axons which may serve different functions.
It is generally assumed that neurons encode information into series of
action potentials, their spike trains, so there is a special interest in
reconstructing the waveform of individual neurons from the recorded
trace. The procedure of proper assignment of spikes to neurons, in order
to draw inferences from neural recordings, is referred to as /neural/
/spike sorting/.
We enhanced the functionality of a popular open-source spike sorting
tool, /nev2lkit/, <http://nev2lkit.sourceforge.net> in order to address
a number of issues raised in experimental laboratory practice. The
detailed description of changes to nev2lkit software as well as a patch
to its latest version, can be found here:
http://neurobot.bio.auth.gr/nev2lkit
This work was implemented in the context of PYTHAGORAS II (EPEAEK)
project, a research program funded by the Greek Ministry of National
Education and Religious Affairs.
Scientific results of this study were published in the following paper:
Adamos D.A., Kosmidis E.K and Theophilidis G., "Performance evaluation
of PCA-based spike sorting algorithms
<http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0169-2607%2808%2900103-X>",
/Computer methods and programs in biomedicine/ (September 2008), vol. 91
(3) pp. 232-44.