Experimental Investigation on Spontaneously Active Hippocampal Cultures Recorded by Means of High-Density MEAs: Analysis of the Spatial Resolution Effects

Based on experiments performed with high-resolution Active Pixel Sensor microelectrode arrays (APS-MEAs) coupled with spontaneously active hippocampal cultures, this work investigates the spatial resolution effects of the neuroelectronic interface on the analysis of the recorded electrophysiological signals. The adopted methodology consists, first, in recording the spontaneous activity at the highest spatial resolution (interelectrode separation of 21 μm) from the whole array of 4096 microelectrodes. Then, the full resolution dataset is spatially downsampled in order to evaluate the effects on raster plot representation, array-wide spike rate (AWSR), mean firing rate (MFR) and mean bursting rate (MBR). Furthermore, the effects of the array-to-network relative position are evaluated by shifting a subset of equally spaced electrodes on the entire recorded area. Results highlight that MFR and MBR are particularly influenced by the spatial resolution provided by the neuroelectronic interface. On high-resolution large MEAs, such analysis better represent the time-based parameterization of the network dynamics. Finally, this work suggest interesting capabilities of high-resolution MEAs for spatial-based analysis in dense and low-dense neuronal preparation for investigating signaling at both local and global neuronal circuitries.