NEURAL RECORDING ON CLOSE-SPACED ARRAYS

The development of silicon substrate recording arrays for the study of several neurons simultaneously has given neuroscientists and prosthesis engineers new options of site distribution and overall geometric shape. The analysis methods for utilizing many channels of data recorded from independent channels has been developed extensively. New silicon electrodes with close-spaced sites present data that has considerable overlap of both neural channels and noise. This characteristic calls upon mathematical methods long utilized for analysis of signals from electromagnetic antenna arrays. Following this line of analysis for tetrode type electrodes has provided benefits for cell signal separation but utilization with larger and more precisely distributed sites builds on these benefits by providing methods to extract spatial cell distributions, improved signal-to-noise ratios for cell signals and the ability to extract more broadly correlated signals such as evoked potentials.