A novel algorithm for online spike detection

Abstract

Recordings of extracellular spikes have been widely used in various fields ranging from basic neuroscientific research to clinical applications. However, in the extracellular recording system, how to accurately detect spikes from the recorded signal in real time is still a major challenging work. Although the existing algorithms for online spike detection have made great progress, there still remains much room for improvement in terms of accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new method for high accuracy and real time spike detection. Concretely, differential operator is firstly employed to accentuate spikes in the signal for its simplicity and strong capacity to detect significant changes. Then, by exploiting the structural features of spikes, the resolution parameter is introduced to improve the performance of differential operator. Finally, a simple and effective measure is utilized to further reduce the influence of background noise, which makes spike detection more accurate. The results of simulated and real data show that the proposed method is able to precisely detect spikes while maintaining low computational complexity.