SfN 2019: Universal Spikedeeptector

State-of-the-art microelectrode array technology enables simultaneous, large-scale single unit recordings from hundreds of channels. Identification of channels recording neural data as compared to noise is the first step for all further analyses. Automatizing this process aims at minimizing the human involvement and time for manual curation. In our previous study, we introduced the “SpikeDeeptector” (SD), which enables us to automatically detect and track channels containing neural data from different human patients implanted with different types of microelectrodes across different brain areas. SD works on human data and to some extent on the data of non-human primates (NHPs). However, to make SD more versatile we proposed a more generalized method called “Universal SpikeDeeptector (USD)”, which is an extended version of SD. USD intends to detect and track the channels containing neural data recorded from four different species (rats, ravens, NHPs and humans) using different kinds of microelectrodes and different recording sites. To our knowledge, there is no method that can simultaneously detect and track neural data of multiple species. To enable contextual learning, USD constructs a feature vector from a batch of waveforms. The constructed feature vectors are then fed into a deep-learning algorithm, which learns contextualized, temporal and spatial patterns. USD is a supervised learning method. Therefore, it requires labeled data for training. It is mainly trained on data from a single human tetraplegic patient, and a small but equal portion of data from the remaining three species. The trained model is then evaluated on a test dataset collected from several humans, NHPs, rats, and birds. The results show that the USD performed consistently well across data collected from each species.