SPIKY: a graphical user interface for monitoring spike train synchrony

With the growing availability of multi-unit recordings there is increasing demand for methods which provide the possibility to study similarity patterns of activity across many neurons. Accordingly, a wide variety of approaches to quantify the similarity (or dissimilarity) between two or more spike trains has been suggested. Recently, the ISI- and the SPIKE-distance [1,2] have been proposed as parameter-free and time-scale independent measures of spike train synchrony. The key property of both measures is that they are time-resolved since they rely on instantaneous estimates of spike train dissimilarity. This makes it possible to track changes in instantaneous clustering, i.e., time-localized patterns of (dis)similarity among multiple spike trains. The SPIKE-distance also comes in a causal variant [2] which is defined such that the instantaneous values of dissimilarity are defined from past information only so that time-resolved spike train synchrony can be estimated in real-time. ... ...