Add Xclust (.CEL) spike sorting interface

[bendichter]

Summary

Add support for reading Xclust .CEL spike-sorted files as a sorting interface.

Xclust is a legacy spike sorting tool from the McNaughton lab (University of Arizona). It outputs ASCII .CEL files containing spike times, cluster assignments, and optionally position data, with a structured header. This format was used for the Neurolab Space Shuttle hippocampal recordings (Knierim, McNaughton & Poe, 2000) and likely other datasets from that era.

File format

• ASCII text with a %%ENDHEADER delimited header section
• Header contains key-value metadata (e.g., Cluster, Start time, End time)
• A Fields: line declares the column names (e.g., time, pos_x, pos_y, head_dir)
• Data rows are whitespace-separated, with spike times in seconds

Reference implementation

A working parser is available here:
https://github.com/catalystneuro/mcnaughton2000-to-nwb/blob/main/src/mcnaughton2000_to_nwb/cel_file.py

Related

• Dataset: DANDI:001754
• Paper: doi:10.1038/72910

[h-mayorquin]

Do you have example .cel data that we could use?

[bendichter]

ESF23D~1.CEL.pdf

[bendichter]

(remove the .pdf suffix)

[h-mayorquin]

Data on gin:
https://gin.g-node.org/NeuralEnsemble/ephy_testing_data/pulls/168