What we can and what we cannot see with extracellular multielectrodes

PLoS Comput Biol. 2021 May 14;17(5):e1008615. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008615. eCollection 2021 May.

Abstract

Extracellular recording is an accessible technique used in animals and humans to study the brain physiology and pathology. As the number of recording channels and their density grows it is natural to ask how much improvement the additional channels bring in and how we can optimally use the new capabilities for monitoring the brain. Here we show that for any given distribution of electrodes we can establish exactly what information about current sources in the brain can be recovered and what information is strictly unobservable. We demonstrate this in the general setting of previously proposed kernel Current Source Density method and illustrate it with simplified examples as well as using evoked potentials from the barrel cortex obtained with a Neuropixels probe and with compatible model data. We show that with conceptual separation of the estimation space from experimental setup one can recover sources not accessible to standard methods.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Brain / physiology*
  • Computational Biology
  • Computer Simulation
  • Electrodes
  • Evoked Potentials / physiology
  • Extracellular Space / physiology
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Models, Neurological*
  • Rats
  • Rats, Wistar
  • Somatosensory Cortex / physiology
  • Vibrissae / innervation
  • Vibrissae / physiology

Grants and funding

The study received funding from the Polish National Science Centre’s grants (2013/08/W/NZ4/00691) and (2015/17/B/ST7/04123). K.K. is funded from European Research Council Starting Grant (H 415148; principal investigator: Ewelina Knapska). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.