Connectionists: ANN: SpikeSort 0.12

[Bartosz Telenczuk]

We are pleased to announce the first official release of the SpikeSort, a new spike sorting library based on dynamic and interactive language (Python). SpikeSort 0.12 is available for download at http://spikesort.org

SpikeSort aims to be both flexible and user-friendly. It achieves that by defining a set of components that can be mix-and-matched to fit specific needs. These components are based on standard scientific libraries, so they can be easily re-used in custom applications.

Main features:

* user-friendly and customisable,
* interactive command-line interface in Python,
* visualization widgets,
* k-means and gaussian-mixture-models (GMM) clustering algorithms and manual cluster cutting,
* support for multi-channel data (for example, from tetrodes),
* support for binary datasets and HDF5 files (support for other formats planned in future version).

SpikeSort includes >60 tests making it one of the best-tested spike sorting software on the market. The distribution also contains full documentation, sample scripts and sample data, so that you can start playing with it almost immediately.

SpikeSort is offered free of charge under a liberal Open Source license (two-clause BSD license) allowing for non-commercial and commercial use.

The project was partially supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeischaft (SFB 618 ``Theoretische Biologie'', project B4). The sample data is available by courtesy of Stuart Baker and Wellcome Trust who provided funding for data collection.

Yours,

Bartosz Telenczuk
Dmytro Bielievtsov