Spike Studio™ was written for several neurobiology laboratories to digitize and analyze physiological signals on the Macintosh® family of computers. Spike Studio will digitize multiple channels of data using digitizing boards from National Instruments or GW Instruments, or using a sound digitizer such as the Macintosh® microphone input. Spike Studio™ allows flexible viewing of the digitized data on the screen, does a variety of analyses on the data, and has nice features for making publication-quality figures from this data.
The power of Spike Studio™ is its event discrimination algorithm, which will automatically pick out all the events in a stretch of data. An event can be a spike, a burst of spikes, a stimulator pulse, or anything else with an onset and an offset. Several types of analyses can then be performed on the events including counting spikes, finding spiking frequencies, finding the peak-to-peak heights, and integrating. Raster plots and PST histograms can be made either on-the-fly or post-processing. In addition, Spike Studio includes data addition, subtraction, and averaging functions. Thus Spike Studio facilitates the analysis of many of the types of data normally encountered in neurophysiological work.
Spike Studio™ has also been successfully used in undergraduate and graduate neurobiology laboratory courses.
Previous to this version, Spike Studio™ has been a commercial product, and it is currently in use in laboratories around the U.S., in Europe, and in Israel. I am now releasing the newest version as pseudo-freeware. What this means is that you are free to use the program as much as you want, without any obligation to pay me. However, if you like the program and wish to encourage me to keep supporting it, and if you want to receive notice of updates, bugs, etc., then I would appreciate getting paid. The price of the program is quite reasonable, perhaps even cheap compared to other commercial data acquisition programs, and I think the benefits you will receive will be worth it..
In any case, Spike Studio™ 3.5 is freely redistributable as long as absolutely no money is charged for the program, for distribution, or for any other reason, and this Read Me file is distributed along with it. Spike Studio™ 3.5 is not public domain, and I retain all rights.
I also have available other programs which were written to aid in analyzing data produced by Spike Studio. One program is a statistics package called I Ching Squared which includes algorithms for finding event lengths, periods, phases, histograms, and several standard statistics, and can perform these operations on multiple files with a single command. Another is a program called Phase D which makes phase diagrams.
To get in touch with me (the author), email, write, or call:
Eli Meir
Dept. of Zoology, NJ-15
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
607-273-1804
meir@zoology.washington.edu
Enjoy,
Eli Meir
Included:
Spike Studio™ version 3.5
Spike Studio manual, in Microsoft Word 5.1® format
Spike Studio manual, in text format (much uglier than above)
A sample data file which can be used to try the program
