Open-Source Tools for Processing and Analysis of In Vitro Extracellular Neuronal Signals

The recent years have seen unprecedented growth in the manufacturing of neurotechnological tools. The latest technological advancements presented the neuroscientific community with neuronal probes containing thousands of recording sites. These next-generation probes are capable of simultaneously recording neuronal signals from a large number of channels. Numerically, a simple 128-channel neuronal data acquisition system equipped with a 16 bits A/D converter digitizing the acquired analog waveforms at a sampling frequency of 20 kHz will generate approximately 17 GB uncompressed data per hour. Today’s biggest challenge is to mine this staggering amount of data and find useful information which can later be used in decoding brain functions, diagnosing diseases, and devising treatments. To this goal, many automated processing and analysis tools have been developed and reported in the literature. A good amount of them are also available as open source for others to adapt them to individual needs. Focusing on extracellularly recorded neuronal signals in vitro, this chapter provides an overview of the popular open-source tools applicable on these signals for spike trains and local field potentials analysis, and spike sorting. Towards the end, several future research directions have also been outlined.