OpenElectrophy: An Electrophysiological Data- and Analysis-Sharing Framework

Front Neuroinform. 2009 May 27:3:14. doi: 10.3389/neuro.11.014.2009. eCollection 2009.

Abstract

Progress in experimental tools and design is allowing the acquisition of increasingly large datasets. Storage, manipulation and efficient analyses of such large amounts of data is now a primary issue. We present OpenElectrophy, an electrophysiological data- and analysis-sharing framework developed to fill this niche. It stores all experiment data and meta-data in a single central MySQL database, and provides a graphic user interface to visualize and explore the data, and a library of functions for user analysis scripting in Python. It implements multiple spike-sorting methods, and oscillation detection based on the ridge extraction methods due to Roux et al. (2007). OpenElectrophy is open source and is freely available for download at http://neuralensemble.org/trac/OpenElectrophy.

Keywords: SQL; analysis; database; electrophysiology; oscillation; python; spike sorting.