Large-Scale, High-Resolution Data Acquisition System for Extracellular Recording of Electrophysiological Activity

Abstract

A platform for high spatial and temporal resolution electrophysiological recordings of in vitro electrogenic cell cultures handling 4096 electrodes at a full frame rate of 8 kHz is presented and validated by means of cardiomyocyte cultures. Based on an active pixel sensor device implementing an array of metallic electrodes, the system provides acquisitions at spatial resolutions of 42 microm on an active area of 2.67 mm x 2.67 mm, and in the zooming mode, temporal resolutions down to 8 micros on 64 randomly selected electrodes. The low-noise performances of the integrated amplifier (11 microV (rms)) combined with a hardware implementation inspired by image/video processing concepts enable high-resolution acquisitions with real-time preprocessing capabilities adapted to the handling of the large amount of acquired data.

Identifying firing mammalian neurons in networks with high-resolution multi-transistor array (MTA)

“…In a more recent version, an array has been presented that has a pitch of 18 µm of 11,016 metal electrodes where only 126 channels, however, can be read out simultaneously [19]. In another approach, an active MEA chip was described with a pitch of 42 µm of 4096 metal electrodes on a CMOS chip with local filtering and amplification [20].…”

Amplitude modulation based readout for very dense active microelectrode arrays

“…Active microelectrode arrays (MEAs), which contain on-chip CMOS circuitry performing signal processing such as amplification or filtering, have recently emerged as devices enabling a large number of closely spaced electrodes to be manufactured along with their readout circuits [1,2,3]. They have been proposed to respond to the need of recording the electrical activity of neural cells at cellular or sub-cellular levels.…”

“…In order to read an entire array of 4'096 electrodes, the front-end amplifiers have been integrated in each recording site in [1]. A spatial resolution of 42 µm is achieved in a 0.35 µm CMOS technology.…”

Real-Time FPGA-Based Multichannel Spike Sorting Using Hebbian Eigenfilters

“…New recording systems with thousands of channels, e.g. the MEA systems with 4096 channels [5], require substantial computational bandwidth to process the real-time recordings. Novel methodology and hardware architecture design are therefore vital to sustain competent performance for the rapidly increasing recording bandwidth.…”

“…These are crucial criteria for multi-channel neuronal signal recording systems. As a result, FPGAs have been employed by a number of neuro-engineering research groups [5] [7].…”