A recent tweet is behind this edition of Customer Driven Innovation. We were contacted on Twitter by a researcher who wanted Offline Sorter to support more than 26 units. We spoke with this customer to learn more about what they were doing with the data and why they needed this feature in Offline Sorter.

The lab was using MountainSort to automatically sort 3-8 hours of data from separate recordings and then importing that to Offline Sorter for curation. Prior to the request for more than 26 units, Plexon had provided the lab with a beta version of Offline Sorter than could handle the very large files (greater than 5GB) that were created when all recordings from a day were combined. This beta version of the software was helpful, but the researcher had a new issue. Mountain Sort was producing more than 40 unites per channel, Offline Sorter could not handle.

At this point, Plexon started to work on adding this feature to the next release of Offline Sorter. In a little over 6 months, OFS v4.7.0 was released. This new version supports up to 702 units per channel. In addition, this version offers better support for viewing on 4K screen resolutions which is common when viewing large datasets. A complete list of new features and enhancements can be viewed on the Offline Sorter Change Log.

Importantly, MountainSort is an open-source software that was designed to automate the spike sorting process as much as possible, but there can still be errors or ambiguities in the output that require manual intervention. Offline Sorter allows the user to visualize and manipulate the data from MountainSort, and manually merge or split clusters as needed.

Plexon is continuously developing our software based on feedback and feature requests from users. We encourage customers to contact us (Yes, Twitter works!) for assistance with data analysis or if they have any requests for new features or improvements.