Pasquet Matthieu O, Tihy Matthieu, Gourgeon Aurélie, Pompili Marco N, Godsil Bill P, Léna Clément, Dugué Guillaume P
Institut de Neurobiologie de la Méditerranée (INMED), Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (Inserm), U901, Marseille, France.
École Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) UMR8197, Inserm, U1024, Paris, France.
Sci Rep. 2016 Oct 21;6:35689. doi: 10.1038/srep35689.
While miniature inertial sensors offer a promising means for precisely detecting, quantifying and classifying animal behaviors, versatile inertial sensing devices adapted for small, freely-moving laboratory animals are still lacking. We developed a standalone and cost-effective platform for performing high-rate wireless inertial measurements of head movements in rats. Our system is designed to enable real-time bidirectional communication between the headborne inertial sensing device and third party systems, which can be used for precise data timestamping and low-latency motion-triggered applications. We illustrate the usefulness of our system in diverse experimental situations. We show that our system can be used for precisely quantifying motor responses evoked by external stimuli, for characterizing head kinematics during normal behavior and for monitoring head posture under normal and pathological conditions obtained using unilateral vestibular lesions. We also introduce and validate a novel method for automatically quantifying behavioral freezing during Pavlovian fear conditioning experiments, which offers superior performance in terms of precision, temporal resolution and efficiency. Thus, this system precisely acquires movement information in freely-moving animals, and can enable objective and quantitative behavioral scoring methods in a wide variety of experimental situations.
虽然微型惯性传感器为精确检测、量化和分类动物行为提供了一种很有前景的方法，但适用于小型自由活动实验动物的多功能惯性传感设备仍然匮乏。我们开发了一个独立且经济高效的平台，用于对大鼠头部运动进行高速无线惯性测量。我们的系统旨在实现头戴式惯性传感设备与第三方系统之间的实时双向通信，该通信可用于精确的数据时间戳记录和低延迟运动触发应用。我们阐述了我们的系统在各种实验情况下的实用性。我们表明，我们的系统可用于精确量化外部刺激诱发的运动反应，用于表征正常行为期间的头部运动学，以及用于监测使用单侧前庭损伤获得的正常和病理条件下的头部姿势。我们还介绍并验证了一种在巴甫洛夫恐惧条件反射实验中自动量化行为静止的新方法，该方法在精度、时间分辨率和效率方面具有卓越性能。因此，该系统精确获取自由活动动物的运动信息，并能够在各种实验情况下实现客观和定量的行为评分方法。
