How to load shanks that were sorted separately

This guide shows you how to load a multi-shank probe whose shanks were spike sorted one at a time, so that each shank has its own spike sorting output.

Steps

  1. Give each shank its own probe entry in the session YAML, with its own folders. Each shank is then a single-shank probe to the GUI, so its trajectory is named xyz_picks.json, with no shank suffix.

  2. Give every entry its own output folder. The results of each entry are written as channel_locations.json with no suffix, so entries sharing an output folder overwrite each other’s results.

    path: /path/to/session

probes:
  shank_0:
    datasets:
      spike_sorting:
        path: shank_0/spike_sorting
      processed_ephys:
        path: shank_0/processed_ephys
      raw_ephys:
        path: shank_0/raw_ephys
      picks:
        path: shank_0/picks
      output:
        path: shank_0/output

  shank_1:
    datasets:
      spike_sorting:
        path: shank_1/spike_sorting
      processed_ephys:
        path: shank_1/processed_ephys
      raw_ephys:
        path: shank_1/raw_ephys
      picks:
        path: shank_1/picks
      output:
        path: shank_1/output

  # shank_2 and shank_3 follow the same pattern

    When every shank uses the same folder names, a probe path and defaults shorten this (see How to avoid repeating paths in a session YAML).

  3. Open the session. The shanks appear in the order they are listed in the file.