pyNeurode: a real-time neural signal processing framework

Accurate decoding of neural signals often requires assigning extracellular waveforms acquired on the same electrode to their originating neurons, a process known as spike sorting. While many offline sorters are available, accurate online sorting of spikes with many channels is still a challenging problem. Existing online sorters either use simple algorithms with low accuracy, can only process a handful of channels, or depend on a complex runtime environment that is difficult to set up. We have developed a state-of-the-art online spike sorting platform in Python that enables large-scale, fully automatic real-time spike sorting and decoding on hundreds of channels. Our system is cross-platform and works seamlessly with the Open Ephys suite of open-source hardware and software widely used in many neuroscience laboratories worldwide. It also comes with a user-friendly graphical user interface to monitor the cluster quality, spike waveforms and neuronal firing rate. Our platform has comparable accuracy to offline sorters and can achieve an end-to-end sorting latency of around 160 ms for 128-channel signals. It will be useful for research in fundamental neuroscience, closed-loop feedback neuromodulation and brain-computer interfaces.