胞外记录是研究脑神经活动的重要技术。神经元胞外记录信号幅度在微伏级,不容易拾取和放大,同时还需要在线记录和分析。一般的胞外记录系统价格昂贵,或者体积大,不适用于自由活动下小动物的记录。本文建立了一种基于虚拟测试技术的实用多电极胞外记录系统,系统由微电极放大器、24位A/D数据采集卡NI4472和在线记录分析软件SPKrec组成。微电极放大器体积小,具有106MΩ输入阻抗,2000倍增益和较低的噪声,数据采集系统精度高、动态范围大,软件可以实现锋电位检测、放电频次直方图等在线分析。在大壁虎的嗅球胞外记录实验中对该系统进行了验证,并与商业系统作了比较,结果表明其具有良好的信号质量,功能可以满足胞外记录的要求。
Extracellular recording is a key technology to study many types of brain functions. However the amplitudes of extracellular spikes are typically about 100 pV and should be picked up and amplified specially, then recorded and analyzed online. Most of the equipments for extracellular recording are either very expensive, or too large for recording in the brains of freely moving small animals.In this paper we developed a practical multi-electrode recording system based on virtual testing technology. The system includes microelectrode amplifier, analog input device NI4472 with 24-bit resolution, and data processing software SPKrec. The features of the hardware are low noise, high input impedance, a total gain of 2 000, and large dynamic range. The software developed in LabVIEW is capable of online analysis, data recording, spike detection, fire rate histograms, etc. The system functions have been verified in extracellular recording in the olfactory bulb of Gekko gecko. The result indicates that the system with performance comparable to that of commercial products meets the requirements of recording experiments.