Automated analysis of standard behavioral tests on mice using color-based tracking
Abstract
Traditional methods for the analysis of mouse behavior have relied on visual observation of mouse activity. More recently, recording video footages of the animal's movement have replaced this. However, the generation and subsequent analysis of data is still solely dependent on the researcher, making the procedure highly subjective, labor-intensive and error-prone. To address these problems, we herein describe an implementation of an image tracking system to be initially applied in the open field test, wherein the exploratory behavior and anxiety levels of the mouse is measured. The system is composed of a web camera attached to a PC and a MATLAB script which implements color-based tracking. The automated system gives results that are in close agreement with manual counting and is twice as fast.