Formerly a collection of data organization and documentation tools, now a pipeline to prepare open ephys tetrode recordings for clustering with KlustaKwik.

The general workflow is to convert to .dat, reference, split into tetrodes, detect spikes, calculate features and call KlustaKwik. Due to legacy, a large .dat file will be generated first and later split. This is of course inefficient, but out of scope for current development.

It's recommended to install in a conda environment. Grab the optimized numpy and scipy from conda, the rest can be installed via pip using pip install -e . in the source directory. It should grab the remaining dependencies.

Additionally, a command line hook should be installed to call the main loop with the short dm.

Help can be accessed via dm -h, giving a list of subcommands. Accessing help for these works as expected, e.g. dm vis -h. Verbose output with more information on steps taken can be accessed with the -v flag and is generally recommended to aid debugging when encountering issues.

Given a recording directory, we can quickly take a look at the data with vis:

dm vis ~/data/2014-10-30_15-04-50

Vis can read open ephys recording directories (containing .continuous), or .dat files and can be provided with a probe file to test proposed channel layouts visually.

Additionally to navigation keys with arrow keys and shift or ctrl modifiers as well as several command line options, pressing f toggles between wideband and a high-pass filtered view. Double clicking prints current view location in the console.

NOTE: The data is streamed in a separate thread, but the thread synchronization was never really looked into again. So opening a file most likely will result in flat lines, just zoom in/out with the RMB or move the signal to refresh the view.

Given that the open ephys recording is most likely not in the proper order, a .prb layout file specifies channel ordering and lists dead channels. Alternatively channel grouping can be specified as CLI arguments and further steps will generate new layout files as needed. If there's a .prb file with the same file name stem as the .dat file, it's detected and used automatically.

Convert 1xx_CHxx.continuous files into flat binary .dat file, reordering channels according to probe file. This requires a settings.xml file to be present to identify which id the recording node uses, among other things.

**NOTE: **Several versions of the open ephys GUI did not create this file when automatic impedance measurement was enabled. In that case a settings.xml file from a recording with identical signal chain can be reused.

Convert from two recordings sets using a layout file, but limit to the first 10 minutes in total (for shorter test files) dm conv ~/data/2014-10-30_15-04-50 ~/data/2014-10-30_15-09-54 -l ~/data/subject_id_16.prb -o ~/proc/testing -D 600

Alternatively, input files can be specified as a line break delimited text file with .txt or .session file extensions. dm conv -v ~/data/session03.txt -l ~/data/session03.prb

Create average of good channels and subtract from all channels, overwriting the unreferenced data. The -Z flag zeros out dead channels. This helps making it obvious during further steps which channels are valid, especially for feature generation and clustering.

dm ref 2014-10-30_15-04-50.dat -Z

The --inplace flag allows to overwrite the file directly to preserve disk space. If this flag is not used, a new .dat file will be generated alongside the original with the _meanref label in the filename.

Split a multi-tetrode file into channel groups as per the (reordered) probe file.

dm split 2014-10-30_15-04-50.dat

Estimate background noise to calculate a channel-specific threshold.