Extracellular Spike Waveforms: Morphology, Biophysics, and Classification Strategies

Abstract

Extracellular spike waveforms provide critical insights into neuronal activity, morphology, and function. Their shape can reveal cell-type identity, excitatory versus inhibitory function, and afferent projections from distal regions. The development of dense, high-channel-count probes now permits recordings from thousands of sites simultaneously, revealing a wider diversity of waveform types than previously appreciated. These advances provide an unprecedented opportunity to link waveform shape to the underlying biophysical processes of neurons and their spatial arrangement relative to the recording electrode. This review examines and catalogs the diversity of extracellular waveforms (includi..