A Generic Technique to Remove a Variety of Electrical Stimulation Artifacts and Detect Stimulus-Embedded Neural Activity

Investigating neural activity is critical to advancing neuroscience and informing clinically-relevant neuromodulation, but it is often burdened by the presence of recording artifacts resulting from electrical stimulation. We developed and evaluated a generalizable method for removing the electrical artifacts elicited by various neurostimulation waveforms. This investigation of a novel variety of stimulation waveforms was facilitated by obtaining and labelling the neural activity of 15 loose cell-attached patch clamp recordings of retinal ganglion cells. These labelled recordings provided 5785 peristimulus spikes for which the pipeline exhibited a true positive rate of 88.7%, false discovery rate of 2.9%, and d-prime of 3.11, far superseding interpolation (of which bore a d-prime of 0.32). We additionally utilized synthesized spike trains to demonstrate recovery of low-amplitude stimulus-embedded spikes with negligible waveform distortion (low root mean square error). This technique could better enable a rich variety of neurostimulation investigations, and aid in the development of clinical neurostimulation strategies.