UnitRefine: A Community Toolbox for Automated Spike Sorting Curation
Anoushka Jain, Robyn Greene, Chris Halcrow, Jake A. Swann, Alexander Kleinjohann, Federico Spurio, Severin Graff, Alejandro Pan-Vazquez, Björn Kampa, Jüergen Gall, Sonja Grün, Olivier Winter, Alessio Paolo Buccino, Matthias H. Hennig, Simon Musall · bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025
Abstract High-density electrophysiology simultaneously captures the activity from hundreds of neurons, but isolating single-unit activity still relies on slow and subjective manual curation. As datasets keep increasing, this poses a major bottleneck in the field. We therefore developed UnitRefine, a classification toolbox that automates curation by training various machine-learning models directly on human expert annotations. Fully integrated in the SpikeInterface ecosystem, UnitRefine combines established and novel quality metrics, cascading classification and comprehensive hyperparameter search to provide optimized models for different applications. UnitRefine achieves human-level performance across diverse datasets, spanning species, probe types, and laboratories, including recordings from mice, rats, mole rats, primates, and human patients. Applied to a large brain-wide dataset, UnitRefine doubled single unit yield and improved behavioral decoding performance. A streamlined graphical interface allows models to be fine-tuned to new datasets and shared via the Hugging Face Hub, enabling broad adoption and community-driven improvement of automated curation workflows.