Systematic Spike Sorting Errors Revealed by Juxtacellular Ground Truth in the Awake Brain

In awake mice, juxtacellular ground truth from 16 neurons shows spike sorting recall is lower than conventional benchmarks, with false negatives rising strongly with bursting and overlap conditions.

• Why it matters: Existing benchmarks rely on anesthetized or in vitro data, yet awake-specific challenges like spike overlap and bursting may change error types and transferability.
• What they did: Using paired juxtacellular–extracellular recordings in awake mice, the authors predicted extracellular waveforms from each juxtacellular waveform to attribute false positives/negatives to intrinsic versus extrinsic factors.
• The result: Bursting and putative overlaps each roughly doubled false negative rates alone and increased them sevenfold together; these co-occurrences explained ~40% of false negatives, and post-hoc merging reduced precision loss only partially.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.