Circuit Models and Experimental Noise Measurements of Micropipette Amplifiers for Extracellular Neural Recordings from Live Animals

Figure 3

(a) Experimental setup of measuring neural voltage responses in the inferior colliculus (IC) induced by auditory stimulation in the ears of an anesthetized gerbil. The auditory stimulation is triggered by a high-quality signal generator. A sharp-tipped micropipette is inserted into the brain of the gerbil held by a piezo drive to reach to the IC for recording. The neural voltage is amplified by the micropipette neural amplifier. The output voltage of the amplifier is subsequently digitized by an analog-to-digital converter and recorded by the computer for further analysis. (b) Illustrated diagram of a gerbil’s brain showing the relative position of the IC.