无标记鼠标追踪在社会实验中的应用。

Markerless Mouse Tracking for Social Experiments.

机构信息

Electrical and Software Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada.

Hotchkiss Brain Institute, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada.

出版信息

eNeuro. 2024 Feb 27;11(2). doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0154-22.2023. Print 2024 Feb.

Abstract

Automated behavior quantification in socially interacting animals requires accurate tracking. While many methods have been very successful and highly generalizable to different settings, issues of mistaken identities and lost information on key anatomical features are common, although they can be alleviated by increased human effort in training or post-processing. We propose a markerless video-based tool to simultaneously track two interacting mice of the same appearance in controlled settings for quantifying behaviors such as different types of sniffing, touching, and locomotion to improve tracking accuracy under these settings without increased human effort. It incorporates conventional handcrafted tracking and deep-learning-based techniques. The tool is trained on a small number of manually annotated images from a basic experimental setup and outputs body masks and coordinates of the snout and tail-base for each mouse. The method was tested on several commonly used experimental conditions including bedding in the cage and fiberoptic or headstage implants on the mice. Results obtained without any human corrections after the automated analysis showed a near elimination of identities switches and a ∼15% improvement in tracking accuracy over pure deep-learning-based pose estimation tracking approaches. Our approach can be optionally ensembled with such techniques for further improvement. Finally, we demonstrated an application of this approach in studies of social behavior of mice by quantifying and comparing interactions between pairs of mice in which some lack olfaction. Together, these results suggest that our approach could be valuable for studying group behaviors in rodents, such as social interactions.

摘要

自动化的社交动物行为量化需要准确的跟踪。虽然许多方法已经非常成功,并具有高度的通用性,可以应用于不同的环境,但身份错误和关键解剖特征信息丢失的问题仍然很常见,尽管通过增加人类在训练或后处理方面的投入可以缓解这些问题。我们提出了一种无标记的基于视频的工具,可同时跟踪相同外观的两只相互作用的老鼠,以在受控环境中量化不同类型的嗅探、触摸和运动等行为,从而提高在这些环境下的跟踪准确性,而无需增加人力投入。它结合了传统的手工跟踪和基于深度学习的技术。该工具在一个基本实验设置中使用少量手动注释的图像进行训练,为每只老鼠输出身体掩模以及口鼻部和尾部基部的坐标。该方法在几种常用的实验条件下进行了测试,包括笼子里的铺料以及老鼠身上的光纤或头台植入物。在自动化分析后无需任何人工校正的情况下获得的结果表明,身份切换几乎消除,并且与纯基于深度学习的姿势估计跟踪方法相比,跟踪精度提高了约 15%。我们的方法可以与这些技术可选地集成,以进一步提高性能。最后,我们通过量化和比较缺乏嗅觉的老鼠之间的相互作用,展示了这种方法在老鼠社会行为研究中的应用。这些结果表明,我们的方法可能对研究啮齿动物的群体行为(如社交互动)很有价值。

https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/8b2d/10901195/107c76775390/eneuro-11-ENEURO.0154-22.2023-g001.jpg

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