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Main Authors: Zhang, Yimu, Han, Dongqi, Wang, Yansen, Lv, Zhenning, Gu, Yu, Li, Dongsheng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03198
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author Zhang, Yimu
Han, Dongqi
Wang, Yansen
Lv, Zhenning
Gu, Yu
Li, Dongsheng
author_facet Zhang, Yimu
Han, Dongqi
Wang, Yansen
Lv, Zhenning
Gu, Yu
Li, Dongsheng
contents Spike sorting is an essential process in neural recording, which identifies and separates electrical signals from individual neurons recorded by electrodes in the brain, enabling researchers to study how specific neurons communicate and process information. Although there exist a number of spike sorting methods which have contributed to significant neuroscientific breakthroughs, many are heuristically designed, making it challenging to verify their correctness due to the difficulty of obtaining ground truth labels from real-world neural recordings. In this work, we explore a data-driven, deep learning-based approach. We begin by creating a large-scale dataset through electrophysiology simulations using biologically realistic computational models. We then present SimSort, a pretraining framework for spike sorting. Trained solely on simulated data, SimSort demonstrates zero-shot generalizability to real-world spike sorting tasks, yielding consistent improvements over existing methods across multiple benchmarks. These results highlight the potential of simulation-driven pretraining to enhance the robustness and scalability of spike sorting in experimental neuroscience.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_03198
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SimSort: A Data-Driven Framework for Spike Sorting by Large-Scale Electrophysiology Simulation
Zhang, Yimu
Han, Dongqi
Wang, Yansen
Lv, Zhenning
Gu, Yu
Li, Dongsheng
Neurons and Cognition
Machine Learning
Spike sorting is an essential process in neural recording, which identifies and separates electrical signals from individual neurons recorded by electrodes in the brain, enabling researchers to study how specific neurons communicate and process information. Although there exist a number of spike sorting methods which have contributed to significant neuroscientific breakthroughs, many are heuristically designed, making it challenging to verify their correctness due to the difficulty of obtaining ground truth labels from real-world neural recordings. In this work, we explore a data-driven, deep learning-based approach. We begin by creating a large-scale dataset through electrophysiology simulations using biologically realistic computational models. We then present SimSort, a pretraining framework for spike sorting. Trained solely on simulated data, SimSort demonstrates zero-shot generalizability to real-world spike sorting tasks, yielding consistent improvements over existing methods across multiple benchmarks. These results highlight the potential of simulation-driven pretraining to enhance the robustness and scalability of spike sorting in experimental neuroscience.
title SimSort: A Data-Driven Framework for Spike Sorting by Large-Scale Electrophysiology Simulation
topic Neurons and Cognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03198