Software - Tint

Tint is a tetrode-based cluster-cutting program that runs under UNIX and Windows. It was designed for the analysis of hippocampal place cell activity. In addition to this we provide a Windows-only package which allows firing rate correlation with various behavioural measures, and easy integration of custom-designed software to suit individual experimental protocols.

The spikes collected by dacq are characterised by a set of parameters including peak-to-peak amplitude, onset latency and amplitude at a user-specified time. Electrode-pair scatterplots are generated and separated into clusters either by a hand-drawn polygon or by a k-means clustering algorithm.

Above: the scatterplots generated by pairwise comparisons of the 4 electrodes of a tetrode. Clusters within the scatterplot were identified and isolated using Tint. Below: A representative 100 waveforms from each of the separated clusters, showing the signature waveform for each of the cells.

Position points (obtained from the output of the video tracker), are smoothed and plotted. Head direction can be calculated if two headlights of known orientation were tracked.

After the spikes have been separated, the location at which they occurred can be superimposed on the position plot and the result smoothed and contour-plotted to allow calculation of the location and rate of the field’s peak.

click for a close-up