An Introduction to Spike Sorting

Jai Bhagat and Caroline Moore-Kochlacs, MIT Description: In in vivo animal models, neuroscience experiments in electrophysiology are commonly performed with the use of extracellular electrodes that get implanted in the cell layer of specific brain regions of interest. These electrodes record voltage traces, and capture the occurrence of putative action potentials when there is a “spike” in the voltage trace. Each spike’s source (a putative, single neuron) is unknown to the experimenter at the time of the recording, so “spike sorting” is an analysis that is performed to group spikes together based on some set of shared characteristics. Each grouping (or cluster) of spikes is assumed to come from the same neuron. This tutorial will start with a quick introduction to common ephys recording set-ups. We will then give an overview of the spike sorting workflow, from filtering the raw voltage traces to assessing the quality of the final spike clusters. The tutorial will end with the participants performing hands-on spike sorting in MATLAB. (Optional) Introductory Reading: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/S...