Fully Integrated Silicon Probes for High-Density Recording of Neural Activity

By J. Jun, Nicholas A. Steinmetz, Joshua H. Siegle, Daniel J. Denman, Marius Bauza, Brian Barbarits, Albert K Lee, Costas A. Anastassiou, A. Andrei, C. Aydın and 25 more. 2017

2,007 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Sensory, motor and cognitive operations involve the coordinated action of large neuronal populations across multiple brain regions in both superficial and deep structures. Existing extracellular probes record neural activity with excellent spatial and temporal (sub-millisecond) resolution, but from only a few dozen neurons per shank. Optical Ca2+ imaging offers more coverage but lacks the temporal resolution needed to distinguish individual spikes reliably and does not measure local field potentials. Until now, no technology compatible with use in unrestrained animals has combined high spatiotemporal resolution with large volume coverage. Here we design, fabricate and test a new silicon probe known as Neuropixels to meet this need. Each probe has 384 recording channels that can programmably address 960 complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) processing-compatible low-impedance TiN sites that tile a single 10-mm long, 70 × 20-μm cross-section shank. The 6 × 9-mm probe base is fabricated with the shank on a single chip. Voltage signals are filtered, amplified, multiplexed and digitized on the base, allowing the direct transmission of noise-free digital data from the probe. The combination of dense recording sites and high channel count yielded well-isolated spiking activity from hundreds of neurons per probe implanted in mice and rats. Using two probes, more than 700 well-isolated single neurons were recorded simultaneously from five brain structures in an awake mouse. The fully integrated functionality and small size of Neuropixels probes allowed large populations of neurons from several brain structures to be recorded in freely moving animals. This combination of high-performance electrode technology and scalable chip fabrication methods opens a path towards recording of brain-wide neural activity during behaviour.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Computation Through Neural Population Dynamics (2020, methodology): “Investigators have since employed other electrophysiological (single- and multielectrode arrays) and optical (calcium imaging and optogenetics) techniques to investigate neural correlates underlying behavior (e.g., Kalaska 2019,O’Shea et al. 2017).”
Challenges and opportunities for large-scale electrophysiology with Neuropixels probes (2018, background): “Black, active silicon, refs [15,20 ,21 ,22] (square icon indicates Neuropixels).”
Spike sorting with Kilosort4 (2024, neutral): “We illustrate the template deconvolution process using a recording shared by the Neuropixels paper 15,16 , containing the visual cortex, hippocampus and thalamus.”
Unsupervised Discovery of Demixed, Low-Dimensional Neural Dynamics across Multiple Timescales through Tensor Component Analysis (2017, background): “Recent experimental advances enable us to monitor all aspects of this complexity by recording large numbers of neurons at high temporal precision (Marblestone et al., 2013; Kim et al., 2016; Lin and Schnitzer, 2016; Pachitariu et al., 2016; Jun et al., 2017) over long durations (L€ utcke et al.”
Neuropixels 2.0: A miniaturized high-density probe for stable, long-term brain recordings (2020, neutral): “Recent advances, including theNeuropixels probe, have leveraged complementarymetal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication methods to considerably expand the number and density of recording sites (6, 7), allowing unprecedented recordings of large populations of neurons distributed across the brain at”
Attractor and integrator networks in the brain (2021, background): “Innovations in recording methods that made it possible to record multiple neurons simultaneously in animals performing naturalistic behaviors [77, 78, 79, 80], have enabled essential tests of these state-space predictions of attractor models.”
A connectome of the Drosophila central complex reveals network motifs suitable for flexible navigation and context-dependent action selection (2020, background): “…a tractable deep recurrent neural network Technical advances over the past several decades have enabled increasingly large-scale recordings of neural activity from the central brains of a wide range of animals (Jun et al., 2017; Lu et al., 2020b; Stringer et al., 2019; Vanwalleghem et al., 2018).”
High-density, long-lasting, and multi-region electrophysiological recordings using polymer electrode arrays (2018, background): “For example, the recently developed Neuropixel probe (Jun et al., 2017) allows for recordings from 384 of 960 total sites, but recording sites must be collinear, and it remains to be established whether long-term tracking of individual neurons is possible.”
An Integrated Brain-Machine Interface Platform With Thousands of Channels (2019, neutral): “Most devices for long-term neural recording are arrays of electrodes made from rigid metals or semiconductors [12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18].”
Training Spiking Neural Networks Using Lessons From Deep Learning (2021, background): “Ongoing advances in procuring largescale electrophysiological recordings at the neuron level can give us a window into observing how populations of spikes are orchestrated to handle credit assignment so efficiently and, at the very least, give us a more refined toolkit to developing theories that ma”
Progress in Neuroengineering for brain repair: New challenges and open issues (2018, background): “In this regard, giant steps have already been taken in the last decades, but there is room for much improvement (Jun et al., 2017; Panzeri et al., 2017; Stanley, 2013).”