EVALUATION OF A PC-BASED DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEM FOR LONG-TERM RECORDING OF ACTION POTENTIALS WITH MINIMAL DEDICATED CIRCUITS

Abstract

Owing to the improvement of computing power, computer-aided multi-unit acquisition and separation rapidly proliferated during the last two decades. To utilize this technology is, however, not easy since task-specific designs are usually mandatory. To overcome this obstacle, a commercial data acquisition system was used to evaluate whether it is possible to accomplish the task of multi-unit acquisition without the aid of these devices. As the results shown that the technique of spike-trigger acquisition can provide the capability to reduce the data amount to 2% while compared with that sampled by continuous acquisition. However, the interval between two consecutive spikes cannot be shorter than 5 ms. This suggests that special designed devices are still necessary.