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Mentors: Josh Siegle (@jsiegle), Jakob Voigts (@jvoigts), Aarón Cuevas López (@aacuevas)
7. Improving the Spike spike-sorting module
Description: The majority of Open Ephys users employ multi-channel extracellular electrodes, such as tetrodes, or or silicon probes. In order to identify the activity of individual neurons in the data coming of such multi-contact probesoff such electrodes, spike-sorting methods need to be used. Traditionally, spike sorting was performed off-line offline after the experiment, but for virtually all on-line online analyses based on spike patterns, spike - sorting needs to be performed in real - time. The Open Ephys GUI already has a module that performs simple spike-sorting (https://github.com/open-ephys/plugin-GUI/tree/master/Source/Plugins/SpikeSorter), but it needs both it's user interface , as well as the internal analysis methods would benefit from some updatesand under-the-hood improvements. Further, the module currently only works with purely manual clustering, which is increasingly less viable because the number of channels recorded with modern probes exceeds what a human experimenter can manually process , or even look at in the time required for a single recording. Spike sorting is a very active field and many Integrating automated or semi-automated spike sorting methods were recently developed and published. Intergating such methods methods methods into the Open Ephys GUI would increase its usefulness for high-channel count experiments.
Skills required: Proficiency in C++, experience designing user interfaces, knowledge of basic machine learning algorithms (ideally implemented in C++, but Python or Julia could also work here)
Level of difficulty: Hard
Mentors: Josh Siegle (@jsiegle), Jakob Voigts (@jvoigts), Aarón Cuevas López (@aacuevas)
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