Solving the spike sorting problem with Kilosort

Spike sorting is the computational process of extracting the firing times of single neurons from recordings of local electrical fields. This is an important but hard problem in neuroscience, complicated by the non-stationarity of the recordings and the dense overlap in electrical fields between nearby neurons. To solve the spike sorting problem, we have continuously developed over the past eight years a framework known as Kilosort. This paper describes the various algorithmic steps introduced in different versions of Kilosort. We also report the development of Kilosort4, a new version with substantially improved performance due to new clustering algorithms inspired by graph-based approaches. To test the…