The Virtual Electrode Recording Tool for EXtracellular potentials is a Matlab tool for simulating extracellular potentials generated by spiking neural networks. More information can be found at http://www.vertexsimulator.org

To run VERTEX, you will need Matlab version 2010b or later and the VERTEX code. Simply extract the zipped folder ‘vertex’ to where you would like to keep the vertex code on your machine.

To be able to run VERTEX simulations, you will first need to add the vertex folder to your Matlab path. You can do this from within the Matlab graphical interface by navigating to where you unzipped the vertex folder in the “Current Folder” pane, right-clicking on the vertex folder, selecting, Add to Path -> Selected Folders and Subfolders.

Alternatively, you can add the vertex folder and subfolders to Matlab’s path using the following code:

addpath(genpath('/path/to/vertex'));

where you should replace /path/to/vertex with the location of the vertex folder on your machine.

To get started with VERTEX, we recommend that you run through the tutorials at http://www.vertexsimulator.org


If you use VERTEX in your research, please reference:

Tomsett RJ, Ainsworth M, Thiele A, Sanayei M, Chen X, Gieselmann MA, Whittington MA, Cunningham MO, Kaiser M. (2014) Virtual Electrode Recording Tool for EXtracellular potentials (VERTEX): comparing multi-electrode recordings from simulated and biological mammalian cortical tissue, Brain Structure and Function. doi:10.1007/s00429-014-0793-x