Faster, More Accurate, Mouse Behavior Tracking Tool

Description

This technology is a software tool to automate the recognition, extraction and tagging of mouse behaviors over an extended timeframe in a comprehensive and objective fashion. Neurobehavioral analysis of mouse phenotypes – especially home cage behaviors, such as those related to maternal care – is essential for numerous research areas, such as the study of brain function in early-life stress, neurodevelopmental diseases, and gene mutations. However, to tag and assess mouse behavior, an experimenter typically must record and watch the experimental video, and then manually tag each behavior by hand. This is a very slow, labor-intensive, and subjective process, resulting in bottlenecks and inconsistencies among human observers.

While various software platforms attempt to improve this labor-intensive practice, they are often limited by being restricted to small numbers of mice at a time and less-natural cage/environment setups (e.g., those without nesting material), and they cannot detect and distinguish maternal behavior and interactions with pups, which can have a critical impact on the experimenter’s analysis.

This technology provides for a much more comprehensive, objective and fine-grained analysis of individual mouse behaviors.

Benefits

Automated – fully automates mouse behavior tagging
More Objective – removing the need for manual observation enables more consistent and objective results
Reduced Handling – reduces the need for different experimenter handling techniques that would disturb mouse behavior, because they can stay in their home cage
Comprehensive – monitors and infers complex trends in individual animal movement and can distinguish maternal/nesting behavior from other behaviors like self-grooming
Versatile – allows for a more ‘natural’ mouse environment and is not limited to specialized cage setups that can bias the results