Recognition of multiunit neural signals

An essential step in studying nerve cell interaction during information processing is the extracellular microelectrode recording of the electrical activity of groups of adjacent cells. The recording usually contains the superposition of the spike trains produced by a number of neurons in the vicinity of the electrode. It is therefore necessary to correctly classify the signals generated by these different neurons. This paper considers this problem, and a new classification scheme is developed, which does not require human supervision. A learning stage is first applied on the beginning portion of the recording to estimate the typical spike shapes of the different neurons. As for the classification stage, a method is developed, which specifically considers the case when spikes overlap temporally. The method minimizes the probability of error, taking into account the statistical properties of the discharges of the neurons. The method is tested on a real recording as well as on synthetic data.