Tridesclous 2
Tridesclous 2 is SpikeInterface’s rewrite of Tridesclous (Samuel Garcia and Christophe Pouzat) from SpikeInterface’s sorting components. It detects locally exclusive peaks, clusters a uniform sample of them by iterative isosplit splits on local SVD features, cleans and merges the templates, and then peels the recording: spikes are found, assigned to the closest template, fitted and subtracted, level after level, with a last matched-filter level for the small spikes left.
In dsp-kitchen it lives in the sorter crates::tridesclous2, ported from the source
(SpikeInterface sorters/internal/tridesclous2.py, clustering/iterative_isosplit.py,
clustering/isosplit_isocut.py, matching/tdc_peeler.py, MIT; sorter version 2026.01, main
f08c987). Its isosplit is SpikeInterface’s own (not isosplit6): ours reproduces it exactly on the
reference cases (playground/benchmarks/isosplit_si_reference.py).
What is implemented
Section titled “What is implemented”| Stage | Status |
|---|---|
| Preprocessing: Bessel band-pass 150–6000 Hz, common median reference, local whitening | implemented |
Detection (locally_exclusive), uniform selection |
implemented |
| Local SVD features, iterative isosplit splits (SpikeInterface’s isosplit) | implemented |
| Templates, cleaning, merging, small clusters; mean templates for the peeler | implemented |
| Tridesclous peeler (host, windows in parallel) | implemented |
Final cleaning (auto_merge_units) |
implemented |
| Motion correction | not yet (off by default upstream too) |
Citation
Section titled “Citation”Tridesclous has no dedicated paper; cite SpikeInterface and the code:
Buccino A. P., Hurwitz C. L., Garcia S., Magland J., Siegle J. H., Hurwitz R., Hennig M. H. SpikeInterface, a unified framework for spike sorting. eLife 9:e61834 (2020). doi:10.7554/eLife.61834
Magland J. F., Barnett A. H. Unimodal clustering using isotonic regression: ISO-SPLIT. arXiv:1508.04841 (2015). arxiv.org/abs/1508.04841
| Code | SpikeInterface (MIT); tridesclous (original) |
| Version followed | sorter 2026.01 (main f08c987, 2026-10-09) |
Run it
Section titled “Run it”dspk sort tridesclous2 recording.bin -o sorted --format phyEvery setting and its default: Tridesclous 2 settings. How it works: pipeline. What to change: tuning.