Signals from extracellular electrodes in neural systems record voltages resulting from activity in many neurons. Detecting action potentials (spikes) in a small number of specific (target) neurons is difficult because many neurons, both near and more distant, contribute to the signal at the electrode. We consider some nearby neurons as target neurons (providing a signal) and all the other contributions to the signal as noise. A new algorithm for spike detection has been developed: this applies a cepstrum of bispectrum (CoB) estimated inverse filter to provide blind equalization. This technique is based on higher order statistics, and seeks to find a sequence of event times or delta sequence. We show that the CoB-based technique can achieve a 98% hit rate on an extracellular signal containing three spike trains at up to 0 dB SNR. Threshold setting for this technique is discussed, and we show the application of the technique to some real signals. We compare performance with four established techniques and report that the CoB-based algorithm performs best.

We characterize a proposed metastability measurement system in which asynchronous data input and sampling clock frequencies trigger metastability. We develop an equation describing the time interval between data and clock inputs for practical frequencies and show that it takes on discrete values in the absence of jitter and that the presence of jitter perturbs these values. Finally, we present experimental results supporting our characterization

Particle swarm has proven to be competitive to other evolutionary algorithms in the field of optimization, and in many cases enables a faster convergence to the ideal solution. However, like any optimization algorithm it seems to have difficulties handling optimization problems of high dimension. Here we first show that dimensionality is really a problem for the classical particle swarm algorithms. We then show that increasing the swarm size can be necessary to handle problem of high dimensions but is not enough. We also show that the issue of scalability occurs more quickly on some functions.