Neuralynx

The Neuralynx electrophysiology system is used at the DCCN for high-density recordings of LFP and spike activity of up to 256 channels. Furthermore, at the DCC a 32 channel Neuralynx setup is used.

The acquisition setup consists of the Digital Lynx amplifier hardware and the Cheetah acquisition software. The Cheetah software runs on a Windows computer that is connected with the amplifier through a fiber-optic cable.

The rt_neuralynxproxy function implements the interface between the Cheetah software and the FieldTrip buffer. Using the dll files that have been made available by Neuralynx, it reads the data and event streams over the network from the Cheetah system and copies them into the buffer. The rt_neuralynxproxy function should be started in a stand-alone MATLAB session because Neuralynx only provides the dlls for Windows.

There is also an older attempt implemented in the code which allows to access the data in pseudo-real time while it is written to disk (i.e. end-of-file chasing). It turned out that that resulted in highly varying delays of up to 10 seconds and therefore we did not pursue this further.

• http://www.neuralynx.com