Simulating extracellular recordings of neuronal populations is an important and challenging task both for understanding the nature and relationships between extracellular field potentials at different scales, and for the validation of methodological tools for signal analysis such as spike detection and sorting algorithms. Detailed neuronal multicompartmental models with active or passive compartments are commonly used in this objective. Although using such realistic NEURON models could lead to realistic extracellular potentials, it may require a high computational burden making the simulation of large populations difficult without a workstation. We propose in this paper a novel method to simulate extracellular potentials of firing neurons, taking into account the NEURON geometry and the relative positions of the electrodes. The simulator takes the form of a linear geometry based filter that models the shape of an action potential by taking into account its generation in the cell body / axon hillock and its propagation along the axon. The validity of the approach for different NEURON morphologies is assessed. We demonstrate that our method is able to reproduce realistic extracellular action potentials in a given range of axon/dendrites surface ratio, with a time-efficient computational burden.

中文翻译：

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基于形态滤波近似值的细胞外作用电位特征的快速仿真。

模拟神经元群体的细胞外记录是一项重要且具有挑战性的任务，既要了解不同规模的细胞外场电势的性质和关系，又要验证信号分析的方法论工具，例如尖峰检测和排序算法。具有主动或被动隔室的详细神经元多室模型通常用于此目标。尽管使用这种逼真的NEURON模型可能会带来逼真的细胞外潜力，但它可能需要很高的计算负担，使得没有工作站就很难进行大种群的模拟。考虑到NEURON几何形状和电极的相对位置，我们提出了一种新颖的方法来模拟激发神经元的细胞外电位。该模拟器采用基于线性几何的滤波器的形式，该滤波器通过考虑动作电位在细胞体/轴突岗中的生成以及其沿轴突的传播来对动作电位的形状进行建模。评估了该方法对于不同NEURON形态的有效性。我们证明了我们的方法能够在给定范围的轴突/树突表面比范围内重现现实的细胞外动作电位，并具有高效的计算负担。