It has recently been demonstrated that extracellular action potential (EAP) recordings contain significant information about the intracellular state of neurons (Gold et al., 2006, Journal of Neurophysiology) This may be particularly useful for interpreting recordings of neuron in vivo , where extracellular recordings are the only data available. This method relies on the Line Source Approximation (LSA) to model the EAP voltage resulting from the spiking activity of individual neurons. (Holt and Koch, 2000, Journal of Computational Neuroscience)
Because the method is relatively complex and not directly supported in the NEURON Simulation Environment we will release a public version of the code used in the paper. The tutorial will review the theory of the LSA, present results pertinent to the use of EAP recordings to tune compartmental models, make the first public distribution of the LSA source code, and support each participant in running a simulation and calculating the resultant EAP.
Participants who wish to run the simulations should bring their own laptop comuter with the NEURON Simulation Environment and Matlab installed.