A fast and effective spike sorting method based on multi-frequency composite waveform shapes

Abstract

Accurate spike sorting to the appropriate neuron is crucial for neural activity analysis. To improve spike sorting performance, it is essential to fully leverage each processing step, including filtering, spike detection, feature extraction, and clustering. However, compared to the latter two steps that were widely studied and optimized, the filtering process was largely neglected. In this study, we proposed a fast and effective spike sorting method (MultiFq) based on multi-frequency composite waveform shapes acquired through an optimized filtering process. When combined with the classical PCA-Km spiking sorting algorithm, our proposed MultiFq significantly improved its sorting performance and achieved as high performance as the complex Wave-clus did in both the simulated and in vivo datasets. But, the combined method was about 10 times faster than Wave-clus (0.16 s vs. 2.06 s in simulated datasets; 0.46 s vs. 2.03 s in in vivo datasets). Furthermore, we demonstrated the compatibility of our MultiFq by combining it with other sorting algorithms, which consistently resulted in significant improvement in sorting accuracy with the maximum improvement at 35.04%. The above results demonstrated that our proposed method could significantly improve the sorting performance with low computation cost and good compatibility by leveraging the multi-frequency composite waveform shapes.