Spike Sorting Based on Window-Gradient Feature

Unsupervised spike sorting, a vital processing step in real-time brain-implantable microsystems, is faced with the prominent challenge of managing nonstationarity in neural signals. In long-term recordings, spike waveforms gradually change and new source neurons are likely to become activated. Adaptive spike sorters combined with on-implant training units effectively process the nonstationary signals at the cost of high hardware resource utilization. On the other hand, static approaches, while being hardware-friendly, are subjected to decreased processing performance in such recordings where the neural signal characteristics gradually change. To strike a balance between the hardware cost and processing performance, this study proposes a hardware-efficient novelty-aware spike sorting approach that is capable of dealing with both variated spike waveforms and spike waveforms generated from new source neurons. Its improved hardware efficiency compared to adaptive ones and capability of dealing with nonstationary signals make it attractive for implantable applications. The proposed novelty-aware spike sorting especially would be a good fit for brain-computer interfaces where long-term, real-time interaction with the brain is required, and the available on-implant hardware resources are limited. Our unsupervised spike sorting benefits from a novelty detection process to deal with neural signal variations. It tracks the spike features so that in case of detecting an unexpected change (novelty detection) both on and off-implant parameters are updated to preserve the performance in new state. To make the proposed approach agile enough to be suitable for brain implants, the on-implant computations are reduced while the computational burden is realized off-implant. The performance of our proposed approach is evaluated using both synthetic and real datasets. The results demonstrate that, in the mean, it is capable of detecting 94.31% of novel spikes (wave-drifted or emerged spikes) with a classification accuracy (CA) of 96.31%. Moreover, an FPGA prototype of the on-implant circuit is implemented and tested. It is shown that in comparison to the OSORT algorithm, a pivotal spike sorting method, our spike sorting provides a higher CA at significantly lower hardware resources. The proposed circuit is also implemented in a 180-nm standard CMOS process, achieving a power consumption of 1.78[Formula: see text][Formula: see text] per channel and a chip area of 0.07[Formula: see text]mm2 per channel.

Protocol for machine learning-based classification of neuronal cell types from spike waveforms

Brain Machine Interface (BMI) systems demand real-time spike sorting to instantaneously decode the spike trains of simultaneously recorded cortical neurons. Real-time spike sorting, however, requires extensive computational power that is not feasible to implement in implantable BMI architectures, thereby requiring transmission of high-bandwidth raw neural data to an external computer. In this work, we describe a miniaturized, low power, programmable hardware module capable of performing this task within the resource constraints of an implantable chip. The module computes a sparse representation of the spike waveforms followed by "smart" thresholding. This cascade restricts the sparse representation to a subset of projections that preserve the discriminative features of neuron-specific spike waveforms. In addition, it further reduces telemetry bandwidth making it feasible to wirelessly transmit only the important biological information to the outside world, thereby improving the efficiency, practicality and viability of BMI systems in clinical applications.

Spike sorting, i.e., the separation of the firing activity of different neurons from extracellular measurements, is a crucial but often error-prone step in the analysis of neuronal responses. Usually, three different problems have to be solved: the detection of spikes in the extracellular recordings, the estimation of the number of neurons and their prototypical (template) spike waveforms, and the assignment of individual spikes to those putative neurons. If the template spike waveforms are known, template matching can be used to solve the detection and classification problem. Here, we show that for the colored Gaussian noise case the optimal template matching is given by a form of linear filtering, which can be derived via linear discriminant analysis. This provides a Bayesian interpretation for the well-known matched filter output. Moreover, with this approach it is possible to compute a spike detection threshold analytically. The method can be implemented by a linear filter bank derived from the templates, and can be used for online spike sorting of multielectrode recordings. It may also be applicable to detection and classification problems of transient signals in general. Its application significantly decreases the error rate on two publicly available spike-sorting benchmark data sets in comparison to state-of-the-art template matching procedures. Finally, we explore the possibility to resolve overlapping spikes using the template matching outputs and show that they can be resolved with high accuracy.

Spike sorting of neural data from single electrode recordings is a hard problem in machine learning that relies on significant input by human experts. We approach the task of learning to detect and classify spike waveforms in additive noise using two stages of large margin kernel classification and probability regression. Controlled numerical experiments using spike and noise data extracted from neural recordings indicate significant improvements in detection and classification accuracy over linear amplitude- and template-based spike sorting techniques.

Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) based on extracellular recordings with microelectrodes provide means of observing the activities of neurons that orchestrate fundamental brain function, and are therefore powerful tools for exploring the function of the brain. Due to physical restrictions and risks for post-surgical complications, wired BMIs are not suitable for long-term studies in freely behaving animals. Wireless BMIs ideally solve these problems, but they call for low-complexity techniques for data compression that ensure maximum utilization of the wireless link and energy resources, as well as minimum heat dissipation in the surrounding tissues. In this paper, we analyze the performances of various system architectures that involve spike detection, spike alignment and spike compression. Performance is analyzed in terms of spike reconstruction and spike sorting performance after wireless transmission of the compressed spike waveforms. Compression is performed with transform coding, using five different compression bases, one of which we pay special attention to. That basis is a fixed basis derived, by singular value decomposition, from a large assembly of experimentally obtained spike waveforms, and therefore represents a generic basis specially suitable for compressing spike waveforms. Our results show that a compression factor of 99.8%, compared to transmitting the raw acquired data, can be achieved using the fixed generic compression basis without compromising performance in spike reconstruction and spike sorting. Besides illustrating the relative performances of various system architectures and compression bases, our findings show that compression of spikes with a fixed generic compression basis derived from spike data provides better performance than compression with downsampling or the Haar basis, given that no optimization procedures are implemented for compression coefficients, and the performance is similar to that obtained when the optimal SVD based basis is used.

During the analysis of neurobiological signals acquired during neurosurgical procedures such as Deep Brain Stimulation, one focuses mainly on the signal’s background and spiking activity. Spikes, the electrical impulses generated by neuron cells, are events lasting about 1.5 ms with voltage typically well below 200 \(\upmu \)V. As the shape of spike derives from the physical construction of the neuron’s cell membrane and its distance from the recording point, one can infer that spikes of different shapes were generated by different neuron cells. This information can be beneficial during the analysis of the acquired signals, and the procedure of grouping spikes according to their shapes, is called spike sorting. Typically in this procedure, there are defined various attributes characterizing spike shape, and subsequently, the standard clustering method is used to produce groups of spikes of different shapes. This may cause some difficulties that arise both from the definition of good discriminating attributes as well as from the fact that one does not know beforehand how many clusters of shapes to expect. The approach presented in this paper is different, using the fully unsupervised and explainable AI, it generates groups of spike shapes in a fully automatic way. No attributes have to be defined nor the expected number of shape clusters provided. Spike waveforms are fed into the autoencoder that has defined additional constraints on its latent layers. After training, data obtained from those layers can be used for the purpose of spike shape clustering. Beside shape class, one also receives information on how much given spike shape differs from the mean shape of its class.

Validating and improving the correction of ocular artifacts in electro-encephalography

Spike sorting is the essential step in analyzing recording spike signals for studying information processing mechanisms within the nervous system. Overlapping is one of the serious problems in the spike sorting of multi-channel recordings. In this paper, a modified radial basis function (RBF) network is proposed to decompose the overlapped signals and separate spikes within the same RBF network. A modified radial basis function based on Gaussian function is employed in the method to improve the accuracy of overlap decomposition. In addition, the improved constructing algorithm reduces the calculation cost by taking advantage of the symmetry of the RBF network. The performance of the presented method is tested at various signal-to-noise ratio levels based on simulation data coming from the University of Leicester. Experiment results show that our method successfully resolves the fully overlapping problem and has better accuracy comparing with the Gaussian function.

Spike sorting is one of the cornerstones of extracellular electrophysiology. By leveraging advanced signal processing and data analysis techniques, spike sorting makes it possible to detect, isolate, and map single neuron spiking activity from both in vivo and in vitro extracellular electrophysiological recordings. A crucial step of any spike sorting pipeline is to reduce the dimensionality of the recorded spike waveform data. Reducing the dimensionality of the processed data is a near-universal practice, fundamentally motivated by the use of clustering algorithms responsible to detect, isolate, and sort the recorded putative neurons. In this paper, we propose and illustrate on both synthetic and experimental data that employing the nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) can drastically improve the performance, efficiency, robustness, and scalability of spike sorting pipelines without increasing their computational cost. We show how replacing the linear or ad hoc, expert-defined, supervised nonlinear dimensionality reduction methods commonly used in spike sorting pipelines by the unsupervised, mathematically grounded, nonlinear dimensionality reduction method provided by UMAP drastically increases the number of correctly sorted neurons, makes the identification of quieter, seldom spiking neurons more reliable, enables deeper and more precise explorations and analysis of the neural code, and paves new ways toward more efficient and end-to-end automatable spike sorting pipelines of large-scale extracellular neural recording as those produced by high-density multielectrode arrays.

Based on benchmarking various methods and analyzing multiple real scRNA-seq datasets, a computational platform/workflow and a set of tips for best practices are developed for analyzing causal interactions or relationships in single cells.

Objective. The OSort algorithm, a pivotal unsupervised spike sorting method, has been implemented in dedicated hardware devices for real-time spike sorting. However, due to the inherent complexity of neural recording environments, OSort still grapples with numerous transient cluster occurrences during the practical sorting process. This leads to substantial memory usage, heavy computational load, and complex hardware architectures, especially in noisy recordings and multi-channel systems. Approach. This study introduces an optimized OSort algorithm (opt-OSort) which utilizes correlation coefficient (CC), instead of Euclidean distance as classification criterion. The CC method not only bolsters the robustness of spike classification amidst the diverse and ever-changing conditions of physiological and recording noise environments, but also can finish the entire sorting procedure within a fixed number of cluster slots, thus preventing a large number of transient clusters. Moreover, the opt-OSort incorporates two configurable validation loops to efficiently reject cluster outliers and track recording variations caused by electrode drifting in real-time. Main results. The opt-OSort significantly reduces transient cluster occurrences by two orders of magnitude and decreases memory usage by 2.5–80 times in the number of pre-allocated transient clusters compared with other hardware implementations of OSort. The opt-OSort maintains an accuracy comparable to offline OSort and other commonly-used algorithms, with a sorting time of 0.68 µs as measured by the hardware-implemented system in both simulated datasets and experimental data. The opt-OSort’s ability to handle variations in neural activity caused by electrode drifting is also demonstrated. Significance. These results present a rapid, precise, and robust spike sorting solution suitable for integration into low-power, portable, closed-loop neural control systems and brain–computer interfaces.

BackgroundPrincipal component analysis (PCA) has been widely employed for automatic neuronal spike sorting. Calculating principal components (PCs) is computationally expensive, and requires complex numerical operations and large memory resources. Substantial hardware resources are therefore needed for hardware implementations of PCA. General Hebbian algorithm (GHA) has been proposed for calculating PCs of neuronal spikes in our previous work, which eliminates the needs of computationally expensive covariance analysis and eigenvalue decomposition in conventional PCA algorithms. However, large memory resources are still inherently required for storing a large volume of aligned spikes for training PCs. The large size memory will consume large hardware resources and contribute significant power dissipation, which make GHA difficult to be implemented in portable or implantable multi-channel recording micro-systems.MethodIn this paper, we present a new algorithm for PCA-based spike sorting based on GHA, namely stream-based Hebbian eigenfilter, which eliminates the inherent memory requirements of GHA while keeping the accuracy of spike sorting by utilizing the pseudo-stationarity of neuronal spikes. Because of the reduction of large hardware storage requirements, the proposed algorithm can lead to ultra-low hardware resources and power consumption of hardware implementations, which is critical for the future multi-channel micro-systems. Both clinical and synthetic neural recording data sets were employed for evaluating the accuracy of the stream-based Hebbian eigenfilter. The performance of spike sorting using stream-based eigenfilter and the computational complexity of the eigenfilter were rigorously evaluated and compared with conventional PCA algorithms. Field programmable logic arrays (FPGAs) were employed to implement the proposed algorithm, evaluate the hardware implementations and demonstrate the reduction in both power consumption and hardware memories achieved by the streaming computingResults and discussionResults demonstrate that the stream-based eigenfilter can achieve the same accuracy and is 10 times more computationally efficient when compared with conventional PCA algorithms. Hardware evaluations show that 90.3% logic resources, 95.1% power consumption and 86.8% computing latency can be reduced by the stream-based eigenfilter when compared with PCA hardware. By utilizing the streaming method, 92% memory resources and 67% power consumption can be saved when compared with the direct implementation of GHA.ConclusionStream-based Hebbian eigenfilter presents a novel approach to enable real-time spike sorting with reduced computational complexity and hardware costs. This new design can be further utilized for multi-channel neuro-physiological experiments or chronic implants.

A novel method of recording neural activity from the rodent medial prefrontal cortex reveals that the medial prefrontal cortex is composed of functionally distinct subregions that process economic decision information differentially along a dorso-ventral gradient.

Red-light running violation prediction using observational and simulator data