Kilosort: realtime spike-sorting for extracellular electrophysiology with hundreds of channels

Abstract Advances in silicon probe technology mean that in vivo electrophysiological recordings from hundreds of channels will soon become commonplace. To interpret these recordings we need fast, scalable and accurate methods for spike sorting, whose output requires minimal time for manual curation. Here we introduce Kilosort, a spike sorting framework that meets these criteria, and show that it allows rapid and accurate sorting of large-scale in vivo data. Kilosort models the recorded voltage as a sum of template waveforms triggered on the spike times, allowing overlapping spikes to be identified and resolved. Rapid processing is achieved thanks to a novel low-dimensional approximation for the spatiotemporal…

• G
  GlaxoSmithKline
• WT
  Wellcome Trust

  Awards: 95669, 325512, 95668
• EA
  Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

  Award: K015141