Shank Count
Shank count is the number of penetrating shanks on a silicon probe; one shank samples a single track through the tissue, and several sample laterally separated tracks in one insertion.
It is the first field of a probe name — the 4 in A4x8-tet-5mm-100-200-177 — and a thin-film grid, which is not inserted, has one by definition.
Several shanks turn a depth profile into a map. With a shank separation of 200 µm, each shank samples its own cylinder of tissue about a detection radius wide, so a 4-shank probe reads four columns of cortex or four positions across a structure at once, and an 8- or 16-shank design covers a plane. The cost is displacement: every shank is a track, and the insertion force and the tissue disturbed both rise with the count, which is why multi-shank designs are more often chosen for acute mapping than for the longest chronic implants. Read the site count from the specification, not from the shank field — what a 4x8 counts depends on the layout token that follows, as probe geometry explains.
Typical values
| Catalog silicon probes | 1 to 16 shanks; 130 of 216 designs have more than one |
|---|---|
| Thin-film grids | 1 by definition |
| Design-space parameter | Shank count (numShanks) |