S of all pairs of clusters. Given a measure of distinctness in between pairs, a cluster was formally defined as “distinct” if it was unambiguously separable from all other clusters. If it was not, then the status was defined as “ambiguous”: spikes might be missing andor the cluster might include subsets of spikes from several different units with equivalent shapes. Note that the term “distinct,” if applied to a cluster pair, indicates only that the pair is distinct. Calling a cluster “distinct” implies that it really is distinct from all other clusters. The goal of the second stage of clustering was for that reason to apply a distinctness measure to all pairs of clusters, merging clusters and reassigning events with the goal of maximizing the number of distinct clusters. Despite the fact that the number of pairs is big (for 100 clusters it can be 4950) the fantastic majority can safely be declared as distinct mainly because they may be physically far apart and have few or no channels in popular. We decided to partially automate the procedure, leaving a final set of pairs for which the user was capable to decide around the basis of visual inspection whether to merge, merge and re-split, define as distinct or leave as ambiguously related. Two measures of cluster similarity were employed as a guide to this method: an RMS measure of template shape similarity in addition to a measure of overlap from the points in clusters pairs in their prevalent principal elements space. Template pairs had been excluded from this comparison (i.e. have been MedChemExpress Lp-PLA2 -IN-1 deemed not to overlap spatially) if much less than half with the members of each sets of channels assigned for the templates were members of the other set. By way of example, a template with only two channels will overlap a different 1 if among the list of two channels can also be assigned for the other template, irrespective of how several other channels the template has, whereas a template with 3 channels wouldn’t overlap if only one of several 3 was in common.RMS template similarityAn obvious measure of similarity in between two clusters is definitely the similarity between their templates. A measure of this is the RMS voltage difference among the pair, which we calculated as: 1 = M=The outcome in the initially clustering stage will be the formation of a number of clusters (10050 is standard) which are individually deemed to be unsplittable. There remains having said that, the problem that eventsqk,l[Tk (n, ) – Tl (n, )]nUk,l = -0.5 (eight)Frontiers in Systems Neurosciencewww.frontiersin.orgFebruary 2014 Volume eight Post six Swindale and SpacekSpike sorting for polytrodeswhere Tk (n, ) is the voltage on channel n, at time of the k-th template; Uk,l denotes the union on the channels in sets Pk and Pl , and M could be the number of points within the summation (= 26 variety of channels in Uk,l ). The measure is symmetrical (i.e. qk,l = ql,k ).Cluster pair overlap2. qk,l 25 V (a conservative criterion that separated clusters with quite different waveforms); 3. ok,l 0.05 (a conservative criterion that identified cluster pairs with pretty small overlap that could safely be assumed to become distinct with couple of wrongly assigned spikes); four. The user indicated that the pair is distinct; We’ll refer to this distinctness test as DT(k,l) returning the worth accurate or false for any provided cluster pair. If a cluster pair fails this test, each clusters are defined as “ambiguous” (= not distinct) no matter what their relations are with other clusters. Within the initial, automated, stage with the merging and reassignment process, PubMed ID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21375407 ambiguous cluster pairs have been merged if qk,l 5.0 V and if ok.