ABSTRACT
Extracellular recording is a key technology to study many types of brain functions. However the amplitudes of extracellular spikes are typically about 100 muV and should be picked up and amplified specially, then recorded and analyzed online. Most of the equipment 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.