Section: New Results

Detection of abrupt changes in electro-physiological signals

Participants : Mamadou Mboup, Lotfi Belkoura, Zoran Tiganj.

Decoding the neural information is one of the most important problems in neuroscience. As it is well known, this information is conveyed by the spike train of electrical discharges, called action potential. One of the difficulties stems from the impossibility, in general, to record the activity of a single neuron but only a mixture activity of all neurons in a measured region. Imperative requirement for the neural information decoding is the ability of action potential detection and sorting (finding out which action potentials are fired by the same neuron).

To make the detection and sorting easier, recording systems usually consist of several electrodes. Each electrode receives the action potentials from all the surrounding neurons. The contribution from a single neuron depends on its distance from the electrode and on the type of the tissue that the action potentials go through.

Recently, we proposed a new method for action potentials detection [64] , in which we show how a new algebraic technique for numerical differentiation presented in subsection 3.2 can lead to a very good performances in neural spike detection as compared to existing methods. We also combine the proposed method with ICA in order to obtain spike sorting.