YASS: Yet Another Spike Sorter applied to large-scale multi-electrode array recordings in primate retina

Spike sorting is a critical first step in extracting neural signals from large-scale multi-electrode array (MEA) data. This manuscript presents several new techniques that make MEA spike sorting more robust and accurate. Our pipeline is based on an efficient multi-stage “triage-then-cluster-then-pursuit” approach that initially extracts only clean, high-quality waveforms from the electrophysiological time series by temporarily skipping noisy or “collided” events (representing two neurons firing synchronously). This is accomplished by developing a neural network detection and denoising method followed by efficient outlier triaging. The denoised spike waveforms are then used to infer the set of spike templates through nonparametric Bayesian clustering. We use a divide-and-conquer strategy to parallelize this clustering step. Finally, we recover collided waveforms with matching-pursuit deconvolution techniques, and perform further split-and-merge steps to estimate additional templates from the pool of recovered waveforms. We apply the new pipeline to data recorded in the primate retina, where high firing rates and highly-overlapping axonal units provide a challenging testbed for the deconvolution approach; in addition, the well-defined mosaic structure of receptive fields in this preparation provides a useful quality check on any spike sorting pipeline. We show that our pipeline improves on the state-of-the-art in spike sorting (and outperforms manual sorting) on both real and semi-simulated MEA data with > 500 electrodes; open source code can be found at https://github.com/paninski-lab/yass.