The advantage of topographic prominence-adopted filter for the detection of short-latency spikes of retinal ganglion cells

Electrical stimulation through retinal prosthesis elicits both short and long-latency retinal ganglion cell (RGC) spikes. Because the short-latency RGC spike is usually obscured by electrical stimulus artifact, it is very important to isolate spike from stimulus artifact. Previously, we showed that topographic prominence (TP) discriminator based algorithm is valid and useful for artifact subtraction. In this study, we compared the performance of forward backward (FB) filter only vs. TP-adopted FB filter for artifact subtraction. From the extracted retinae of rd1 mice, we recorded RGC spikes with 8×8 multielectrode array (MEA). The recorded signals were classified into four groups by distances between the stimulation and recording electrodes on MEA (200-400, 400-600, 600-800, 800-1000 µm). Fifty cathodic phase-1(st) biphasic current pulses (duration 500 µs, intensity 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 µA) were applied at every 1 sec. We compared false positive error and false negative error in FB filter and TP-adopted FB filter. By implementing TP-adopted FB filter, short-latency spike can be detected better regarding sensitivity and specificity for detecting spikes regardless of the strength of stimulus and the distance between stimulus and recording electrodes.