Abstract
With the advancement in imaging technology, many commercial systems have been developed for performing motion analysis in mice. However, available commercial systems are expensive and use proprietary software. In this paper, we describe a low-cost, camera-based design of an autonomous gait acquisition and analysis system for inspecting gait deficits in C57BL/6 mice. Our system includes video acquisition, autonomous gait-event detection, gait-parameter extraction, and result visualization. We provide a simple, user-friendly, step-by-step detailed methodology to apply well-known image processing techniques for detecting mice footfalls and calculating various gait parameters for analyzing gait abnormalities in healthy and neurotraumatic mice. The system was used in a live animal study for assessing recovery in a mouse model of Parkinson's disease. Using the videos acquired in the study, we validate the performance of our system with receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and Hit : Miss : False (H : M : F) detection analyses. Our system correctly detected the mice footfalls with an average H : M : F score of 92.1 : 2.3 : 5.6. The values for the area under an ROC curve for all the ROC plots are above 0.95, which indicates an almost perfect detection model. The ROC and H : M : F analyses show that our system produces accurate gait detection. The results observed from the gait assessment study are in agreement with the known literature. This demonstrates the practical viability of our system as a gait analysis tool.
Highlights
Gait impairments are one the most common traits of many neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease (PD), multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Huntington’s disease, and spinal cord injury
With advancements in imaging technology, many commercial systems have been developed for monitoring mice gaits, such as Animal Strideway Systems (Tekscan, Inc., South Boston, MA, USA), DigiGait Imaging Systems (Mouse Specifics, Inc., Framingham, MA, USA), and CatWalk XT (Noldus Information Technology, Wageningen, NL). ere even have been individual attempts to develop an independent gait analysis system, such as one made by Casey Harr of the University of Kentucky [5]. e Animal Strideway System uses thin-film force sensors for gait acquisition combined with digital imaging software for Journal of Healthcare Engineering displaying the results. e DigiGait Imaging System implements a treadmill with a transparent treadmill belt and digital imaging hardware and software
Our gait acquisition system consists of a long trackway across which a single mouse can run and algorithms to detect the position and pressure of footfalls. e trackway is two meters long and is made of glass, with a rectangular enclosure, a ventrally located camera to capture footfalls, top- and side-mounted LEDs, and a computer with our data processing algorithms and a graphical user interface (GUI) developed in MATLAB. e rectangular enclosure is made of plastic and is placed on the top of the glass trackway to ensure that the mouse continues to run in a particular direction during an experiment. e goal of the system is to autonomously detect and analyze the gait characteristics of the mouse for the experiment
Summary
Gait impairments are one the most common traits of many neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease (PD), multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Huntington’s disease, and spinal cord injury. While validated commercial systems for gait analysis in mice exist, they remain expensive and use patented or proprietary implementation of unpublished work. With advancements in imaging technology, many commercial systems have been developed for monitoring mice gaits, such as Animal Strideway Systems (Tekscan, Inc., South Boston, MA, USA), DigiGait Imaging Systems (Mouse Specifics, Inc., Framingham, MA, USA), and CatWalk XT (Noldus Information Technology, Wageningen, NL). CatWalk XT uses a glass trackway equipped with image capturing hardware and software for gait assessment. All these systems provide possible options for gait acquisition in their own right, but they remain quite expensive and are protected with patents that apply closed source implementation
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