RESUMEN
Since the output of retina for visual stimulus is carried by neurons of very diverse functional properties, it is not adequate to use conventional single electrode for recording the retinal action potential. For this purpose, we used newly developed multichannel recording system for monitoring the simultaneous electrical activities of many neurons in a functioning piece of retina. Retinal action potentials are recorded with an extra-cellular planar array of 60 microelectrodes. In studying the collective activity of the ganglion cell population it is essential to recognize basic functional distinctions between individual neurons. Therefore, it is necessary to detect and to classify the action potential of each ganglion cell out of mixed signal. We programmed M-files with MATLAB for this sorting process. This processing is mandatory for further analysis, e.g. poststimulus time histogram (PSTH), auto-correlogram, and cross-correlogram. We established MATLAB based protocol for waveform classification and verified that this approach was effective as an initial spike sorting method.