Synthetic tetrode recording dataset with spike-waveform drift

<p><strong>Introduction</strong></p> <p>This synthetic ground-truth dataset accurately models long-term, continuous extracellular tetrode recordings from the rodent brain over a time-period of 256 hours. Each "recording" comprises spiking of 8 distinct single-units with firing rates ranging from 0.1 - 6 Hz, superimposed on background multi-unit spiking activity at 20 Hz. The recording sampling rate is 30 kHz. Single-unit spike amplitudes drift over a range of 100 to 400 <span class="math-tex">\(\mu V\)</span> based on the drift we observe in our own long-term recordings from the rodent motor cortex and striatum. For more details, please see our paper "Automated long-term recording and analysis of neural activity in behaving animals" ( https://doi.org/10.1101/033266).</p> <p>These recordings can be used to test the accuracy of spike-sorting algorithms when clustering non-stationary spike waveform data, such as our own Fast Automated Spike Tracker (FAST) outlined in our paper and available at https://github.com/Olveczky-Lab/FAST.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Dataset</strong></p> <p>Due to size restrictions, we provide here 1 sample tetrode of the full 6 tetrode dataset. Please contact us (https://olveczkylab.oeb.harvard.edu/about) if you require access to the other 5 synthetic tetrode recordings.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Instructions</strong></p> <p>The dataset comprises spike times and spike waveform snippets extracted a continuous synthetic tetrode recording. Provided are...</p> <ul> <li>A <strong>SpikeTimes</strong> file with a list of sample numbers for detected events (spikes) at <em>uint64</em> precision.</li> <li>A <strong>Spikes</strong> file with the waveforms of the detected events in <em>int16</em> precision. Each event waveform comprises <em>4 channels X 64 samples</em> 16-bit words arranged in the order [Ch0-Sample0, Ch1-Sample0, Ch2-Sample0, Ch3-Sample0, Ch0-Sample1, etc.]. To convert to units of voltage, change type to double precision and multiply by 1.95e-7.</li> <li>A <strong>SnippeterSettings.xml</strong> file with snippeting parameters (this is auto-generated by the FAST snippeting algorithm).</li> <li>A <strong>dataset_params.mat</strong> MATLAB data file containing the simulation parameters. The most important variables in the mat file are <em>sp</em> which contains a list of true spike-times (in samples @ 30 kHz) for all single-units in the dataset, and <em>sp_u</em> which specifies which unit (1-8) each spike originates from. Spike-times are generated by a homogenous Poisson process with firing rate specified for each unit by the variable <em>uFRs</em> and an absolute refractory period of 2 ms. The variable <em>d_Amps</em> specifies the amplitude of each single-unit spikes. The basic spike-waveform shape of each unit is provided in the variable <em>uWVs</em>. The spike-times and identity of background (multi-unit) spikes are specified in <em>b_sp</em> and <em>b_sp_u</em>. </li> </ul>