Efficient and effective use and re-use of data requires productive tools and approaches for curating, organizing, processing, and sharing datasets, all of which needs to be appropriately designed for the specifics of the data under study. While recent work has developed myriad tools and resources for common recording modalities such as human neuroimaging or animal model electrophysiology, less common recording modalities – for example recordings of single-neuron activity from human neurosurgical patients – have fewer available resources that provide the dedicated tooling and procedures needed to meet the specific needs of managing, analyzing, and sharing such data. To address this need, here we introduce the ‘Human Single-Neuron Pipeline’, an open-source processing pipeline for managing projects collecting and/or analyzing human single-neuron data. This pipeline leverages existing resources by adopting and adapting available tooling as well as developing novel required elements. This functionality is organized into a unified framework in a modular fashion, to create a set of template structures that address the specifics of human single-neuron recordings. This includes resources and utilities for assisting with pre-processing human single-neuron data, organizing the data into the Neurodata Without Borders standardized data format, and analyzing such data, all of which is designed for flexible use across variable task designs, pre-processing approaches, and analysis goals. Overall, the Human Single-Neuron pipeline provides a guide for structuring projects and managing analyses following best practices in code and data management that can be used to organize projects within individual labs, assist with coordinating between labs, and, where relevant, promote productive sharing of data and code for human single-neuron projects.
Donoghue et al. (Thu,) studied this question.