A data acquisition card suited for adaptive temporal recording of fast electrophysiological events

Sections of electrophysiological signals of interest or events are often separated by long baseline periods. Due to their higher slew rates, such events must be acquired at a faster rate. The authors can take advantage of the fact that baseline and other sections of less importance can be sampled at a much lower rate for reconstruction. Therefore, it becomes critical to have a system capable of allowing software to detect such pre-programmed events on any sampled channels and to react accordingly by prioritizing and re-ordering accesses to the channels of interest in real-time. Unlike conventional data acquisition cards where accesses are done in a priori order, the authors' system allows low latency accesses to be performed in an order dependent on the location of occurrence of such events. This new configuration and the related hardware implementation a new significant performance improvement and flexibility for recording fast electrophysiological events. The methodology and the implementation are described briefly.