Multi-unit spike discrimination using wavelet transforms

A new spike discrimination procedure addressing the specific problem of spike superposition is described. The method, based on a shift-invariant wavelet transform and its amplitude-and-phase representation, has the advantage of both reducing the effect of noise present in the data and correcting the latency of specific components in a waveform. When spikes overlap and produce unknown patterns, the procedure extracts the constituent spikes and also estimates their exact time of occurrence. Fast implementation algorithms, having complexity of at most O (N log N), allow the use of the method in real-time applications.