What we can and what we cannot see with extracellular multielectrodes

Extracellular recording is an accessible technique used in animals and humans to study the brain physiology and pathology. As the number of recording channels and their density grows it is natural to ask how much improvement the additional channels bring in and how we can optimally use the new capabilities for monitoring the brain. Here we show that for any given distribution of electrodes we can establish exactly what information about current sources in the brain can be recovered and what information is strictly unobservable. We demonstrate this in the general setting of previously proposed kernel Current Source Density method and illustrate it with simplified examples as well as using evoked potentials from the barrel cortex obtained with a Neuropixels probe and with compatible model data. We show that with conceptual separation of the estimation space from experimental setup one can recover sources not accessible to standard methods.Author summary: Every set of measurements is a window into reality rendering its incomplete or distorted picture. It is often difficult to relate the obtained representation of the world to underlying ground truth. Here we show, for brain electrophysiology, for arbitrary experimental setup (distribution of electrodes), and arbitrary analytical setup (function space of current source densities), that one can identify distributions of current sources which can be recovered precisely, and those which are invisible in the system. This shows what is and what is not observable in the studied system for a given setup, allows to improve the analysis results by modifying analytical setup, and facilitates interpretation of the measured sets of LFP, ECoG and EEG recordings. In particular we show that with conceptual separation of the estimation space from experimental setup one can recover source distributions not accessible to standard methods.