Accuracy and power tradeoff in spike sorting microsystems with cubic spline interpolation

Accurate spike sorting is an important issue for neuroscientific and neuroprosthetic applications. The sorting of spikes depends on the features extracted from the neural waveforms, and a better sorting performance usually comes with a higher sampling rate (SR). However the long duration experiment on free-moving subjects is the current trend. For low power considerations, the compromise on sorting accuracy is made for the miniaturized and wireless neural recording ICs with a lower SR. In this paper, we introduce the cubic spline interpolation to strike the power and accuracy tradeoff on the recording microsystems for the off-site and on-chip spike sorter. According to the simulation results, the recorder operated with the SR of 12.5k sample per second (sps) outperforms the system with 25ksps SR on both accuracy and power if the interpolation is appropriately performed before the spike sorting.