Development:Small High Bandwidth Telemetry System

描述（由申请人提供）：听觉神经生理学领域目前需要一种小型高带宽遥测系统，该系统将能够记录不受约束的动物对自然声刺激的许多神经活动通道。这样的系统将提供一个强大的工具，用于追踪处理特定物种发声的神经通路。发射机将提供多达64个神经通道，其中每个通道将以50 KHz采样，并将为1 cm3的大小。它将被设计成允许多达八个同时系统，这将允许研究人员研究社会群体或群体中动物之间的相互作用，声音交流和通信。发射机将被设计成提供一个接口来记录来自几个小型安装麦克风的声音信号。同时记录声波和神经通道将使这些信号相互关联。虽然该系统将针对狨猴的听觉神经生理学，但它将足以用于许多神经行为学应用。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): There is a current need in the field of auditory neurophysiology for a small high bandwidth telemetry system that will enable the recording of many channels of neural activity in unrestrained animals in response to natural acoustic stimuli. Such a system will provide a powerful tool that will be used to trace neural pathways that process species-specific vocalizations. The transmitter will provide up to 64 neural channels where each channel will be sampled at 50 KHz and will be 1 cm3 in size. It will be designed to allow up to eight simultaneous systems, which will permit researchers to study interactions, vocal exchanges, and communications between and among animals within a social group or colony. The transmitter will be designed to provide an interface to record acoustic signals from several small mounted microphones. Recording both acoustic and neural channels simultaneously will allow these signals to be correlated. Although the system will be targeted at auditory neurophysiology in marmosets, it will be general enough to be used in many neuroethology applications. Specific Aim 1: To develop a 5.8 GHz transmitter that is 1 cm2 in size and that consumes only 90mW of power. The transmitter will be designed to allow up to eight systems to occupy the 5.8 GHz ISM band simultaneously. Specific Aim 2: To develop an amplifier and multiplexer front end for 64 channels that will fit on several boards of size 1 cm2. This will be accomplished by a chip-on-board approach. This will allow the 5.8 GHz transmitter and analog front end to be 1 cm3 in size. Specific Aim 3: To develop a flexible on-line data analysis and Ethernet backend to the telemetry system so that functions such as spike sorting and/or reverse correlation can be performed in real-time as data is collected. Health Relevance: It is believed that studying the neuroethological aspects of communication sounds will contribute most to the understanding of how speech sounds are processed by humans. Studying how a vocally active primate can identify and extract behaviorally relevant vocalizations from other sounds will provide a model that will allow the development of signal processing algorithms that can extract speech signals from other non-speech sounds. This will have a direct impact on improving engineering applications such as robust speech recognition systems and hearing aids.