Our Cheetah Software provides the ultimate electrophysiology recording experiment control available with respect to signal processing performance, data displays, digital signal processing, efficient CPU usage and its ability to process a large number of channels.
Channel Cloning and Digital Filtering
Digital systems, such as the Digital Lynx, eliminate the channel duplication problem by digitizing and sending the signal to Cheetah without any analog domain modification. This allows Cheetah to perform digital filtering (referred to as Digital Signal Processing or DSP) on the signal. Because of this, you can actually make unlimited copies, known as “clones,” of each input channel and use Cheetah to perform the filtering. Changes to the settings of an acquisition entity using one of the cloned channels will not affect any other acquisition entities using other clones of that channel. The most common use of channel cloning is to record a continuous version of one of the channels of a tetrode. Doing this allows you to filter for low frequency signals, such as theta, while still recording the high frequency spike activity without any special connections or equipment.
Reference Selection
Cheetah makes Digital Reference Selector (DRS) setup easy by handling all of the hardware settings behind the scenes. Instead of having to control each setting of the DRS hardware, Cheetah allows references to be set for an acquisition entity (AE) directly from the AE property page. There is no need to deal with the complexities of how the DRS boards interact with the input boards or with each other. In addition, you do not need to program all of your references in a configuration file. The reference selection list in Cheetah will only show A/D Channels and dedicated references that the hardware is currently capable of using as a reference for a particular AE. Once a reference is selected, Cheetah will handle the hardware changes necessary to set the reference appropriately.