High channel count electrophysiology and data processing for freely-moving animals

PROJECT SUMMARY Simultaneous recording and stimulation of larger populations of neurons distributed throughout the brain is needed to rigorously evaluate theories of neural computation at the cellular level in mammalsPreviouslywe introduced close packed silicon probesScholvin et aland a direct to disk data acquisition architectureKinney et alto enablechannel neural recording in head fixed animalsPreliminary DataThrough pilot studies we demonstrated the successful recording of terabytes of neural spiking activityPreliminary Databut also discovered some shortcomings of the architectureTwo design elements in particular were limitingFirstour headstages were too bulky for freely moving experimentsSecondour acquisition hardware did not have the ability to quickly analyze allchannels of dataAs a resultit took days to weeks to understand the neural activity content of the terabyte size recordingsFor ultra high channel count neural recordings to become routinethe acquisition architecture must allow and facilitate rapid online and offline analysis of large amounts of dataA computer architecture with local data storage and analysis is favoredsince achannel recordinge gchannels sampled withbits atkHzgenerates neural data at a sustained rate that exceed typicalgigabit ethernetnetwork connection speed to compute clusters or the cloudAccordinglywe propose achannel silicon probe for freely moving electrophysiology experiments in combination with a data acquisition system optimized for easy data analysisThe novel silicon probe will record and stimulateclosed packed sitesbe compact enough for freely moving rodent experimentsand reduce headstage cost by a factor ofdown to $per channelFurthermorethe re designed acquisition hardware will not only capturechannels of neural data and store to solid state drive over a high speed busbut will now also copy the data to a GPU for spike sorting and RAM for visualization both online and offlineTo test the systemwe will performchannel freely moving neural recordings in rodentsin collaboration withat leastlabs with expertisesee letters of supportPROJECT NARRATIVE Electrophysiological recording systems allow direct observation of neural activity in animal subjectsThis facilitates the study of crucial neuroscientific topics such as developmentlearning and memoryand cognitionas well as brain diseases such as Alzheimer sepilepsyParkinson sand depressionLeafLabstools for performing and analyzing high channel count electrophysiology experiments in freely moving rodents will allow researchers to collect and interpret neural data at a large scale