Comprehensive Summary
Brain-computer interfaces are built upon precise decoding of neural signals. Spike sorting is a crucial step in this process to extract individual neural activities from complex neural data. This paper presents a spiking neural network (SNN) framework for efficient spike sorting, which is named SIFT-RSNN. In this new framework, raw neural signals are encoded into spike trains using a threshold-based temporal encoding strategy, where continuous time signals are converted into spikes only when the signal's variation crosses a defined threshold. Misfiring spikes are refined using a sparse-integrated filtering module, which enhances data sparsity for pattern learning. Overall, the SIFT-RSNN with a membrane shortcut structure has efficient feature transfer and improved generalization performance. When tested on the Difficult1 and Difficult2 subsets of Leicester datasets, the SIFT-RSNN scored higher than current state-of-the-art methods at 96.2% and 99.6%, respectively. The authors conducted it on a compute-in-memory platform with 8kmemristor cells, using quantization-free mapping method, and propose two strategies to mitigate non-ideal hardware effects. After optimization, the algorithm still outperforms existing spike sorting methods and has higher robustness. The memristor platform only exhibits a 2% and 1.5% accuracy drop compared to software results on the two difficult subsets. Additionally, it achieves 3.52 μJ energy consumption and 0.5 ms latency per inference.
Outcomes and Implications
This work offers promising solutions for brain-computer interfaces systems and neural prosthesis applications in the future