Abstract
Grooming is a common behavior for animals to care for their fur, maintain hygiene, and regulate body temperature. Since various factors, including stressors and genetic mutations, affect grooming quantitatively and qualitatively, the assessment of grooming is important to understand the status of experimental animals. However, current grooming detection methods are time-consuming, laborious, and require specialized equipment. In addition, they generally cannot discriminate grooming microstructures such as face washing and body licking. In this study, we aimed to develop an automated grooming detection method that can distinguish facial grooming from body grooming by image analysis using artificial intelligence. Mouse behavior was recorded using a standard hand camera. We carefully observed videos and labeled each time point as facial grooming, body grooming, and not grooming. We constructed a three-dimensional convolutional neural network (3D-CNN) and trained it using the labeled images. Since the output of the trained 3D-CNN included unlikely short grooming bouts and interruptions, we set posterior filters to remove them. The performance of the trained 3D-CNN and filters was evaluated using a first-look dataset that was not used for training. The sensitivity of facial and body grooming detection reached 81.3% and 91.9%, respectively. The positive predictive rates of facial and body grooming detection were 83.5% and 88.5%, respectively. The number of grooming bouts predicted by our method was highly correlated with human observations (face: r = 0.93, body: r = 0.98). These results highlight that our method has sufficient ability to distinguish facial grooming and body grooming in mice.
Highlights
Experimental animals exhibit various behaviors, such as ambulation, immobility, rearing, scratching, and grooming
We examined whether 3D-convolutional neural networks (CNNs) could improve the discrimination ability of mouse grooming
We evaluated the trained 3D-CNN performance for the validation dataset at every 200 epochs and found that the accuracy and macro F1 scores reached a plateau at 3,000 epochs (Supplementary Figures 1A,B)
Summary
Experimental animals exhibit various behaviors, such as ambulation, immobility, rearing, scratching, and grooming. Since behavior reflects the mental and physical condition of an animal, we can estimate it by observing its behavior. Grooming is one of the common behaviors to care for fur, maintain hygiene, and regulate body temperature in experimental animals such as mice, rats, and others (Almeida et al, 2015; Kalueff et al, 2016). Grooming motion is composed of several microstructures, such as face washing and body licking (Kalueff and Tuohimaa, 2004; Kalueff et al, 2007). They typically groom themselves from the head to the genitals and tail.
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