Compressive Sensing of Neural Action Potentials Using a Learned Union of Supports

—Wireless neural recording systems are subject to stringent power consumption constraints to support long-term recordings and to allow for implantation inside the brain. In this paper, we propose using a combination of on-chip detection of action potentials (“spikes”) and compressive sensing (CS) techniques to reduce the power consumption of the neural recording system by reducing the power required for wireless transmission. We empirically verify that spikes are compressible in the wavelet domain and show that spikes from different neurons acquired from the same electrode have subtly different sparsity patterns or supports. We exploit the latter fact to further enhance the sparsity by incorporating a union of these supports learned over time into the spike recovery procedure. We show, using extracellular recordings from human subjects, that this mechanism improves the SNDR of the recovered spikes over conventional basis pursuit recovery by up to 9.5 dB (6 dB mean) for the same n...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: BSN
• Authors: Zainul Charbiwala, Vaibhav Karkare, Sarah Gibson, Dejan Markovic, Mani B. Srivastava
• Keywords: Basis Pursuit, BSN 2011, Sensor Networks, Sparsity Patterns, Spike Rate