Before revision: Extracellular recordings using modern, dense probes provide detailed footprints of action potentials (spikes) from thousands of neurons simultaneously. Inferring the activity of single neurons from these recordings, however, is a complex blind source separation problem, complicated both by the high intrinsic data dimensionality and large data volume. Despite these complications, dense probes can allow for the estimation of a spike's source location, a powerful feature for determining the firing neuron's position and identity in the recording.
After revision: Determining the positions of neurons in an extracellular recording is useful for investigating the functional properties of the estimation of a spike's source location, a powerful feature for determining the firing neuron's position and identity in the recording.