Resolution of spike overlapping by biogeography-based optimization

Abstract

There are many cases in which the separation of different sources from single channel recordings is important, for example, in fluorescence spectral overlap compensation, electrical impedance signaling, intramuscular electromyogram decomposition or in the case of spike sorting of neuron potentials from microelectrode arrays (MEA). Focusing on the latter, the problem can be faced by identifying spikes emerging from the background and clustering into different groups, indicating the activity of different neurons. Problems are found when more spikes are superimposed in overlapped waveforms. We discuss the application of Biogeography-Based Optimization (BBO) to resolve this specific problem. Our algorithm is compared with three spike-sorting methods (SpyKING Circus, Common Basis Pursuit and Klusta), showing statistically better performance (in terms of F1 score, True Positive Rate—TPR and Positive Predictive Value—PPV) in resolving overlaps in realistic, simulated data. Specifically, BBO showed median F1, TPR and PPV of 100%, 100% and about 75%, respectively, considering a simulated noise with the same spectral density as the experimental one and a similar power with highly statistically significant improvements of at least two performance indexes over each of the other three tested algorithms.