Abstract
ABSTRACTXenopus laevis frogs are a widely used organism to study aspects of modern biology (Harland and Grainger, 2011). Its central nervous system is particularly interesting, because in certain stages of metamorphosis the spinal cord can regenerate after injury and recover swimming. With this in mind, automatic gait analysis could help evaluate the regenerative performance by means of a method that automatically and quantitatively establishes the degree in froglets' limb movement. Here, we present an algorithm that characterizes spinal cord damage in froglets. The proposed method tracks the position of the limbs throughout videos and extracts kinematic features, which posteriorly serve to differentiate froglets with different levels of damage to the spinal cord. The detection algorithm and kinematic features chosen were validated in a pattern recognition experiment in which 90 videos (divided equally in three classes: uninjured, hemisected and transected) were classified. We conclude that our system is effective in the characterization of damage to the spinal cord through video analysis of a swimming froglet with a 97% accuracy. These results potentially validate this methodology to automatically compare the recovery of spinal cord function after different treatments without the need to manually process videos. In addition, the procedure could be used to measure the kinematics and behavioral response of froglets to different experimental conditions such as nutritional state, stress, genetic background and age.
Highlights
Xenopus offers multiple advantages as a model organism to study development, regeneration, behavior and evolution
Xenopus frogs are attractive to study central nervous system (CNS) regeneration because they swim at certain developmental stages when they are able to regenerate the spinal cord after injury (SCI) and recover
Received 4 March 2019; Accepted 2 December 2019 the ability to swim. This ability is progressively lost throughout metamorphosis resulting in non-regenerative froglets and adult frogs that are no longer able to recover after SCI (Gaete et al, 2012; Muñoz et al, 2015; Edwards-Faret et al, 2017)
Summary
Xenopus offers multiple advantages as a model organism to study development, regeneration, behavior and evolution. The swimming of tadpoles and froglets has been analyzed before with kinematic approaches in order to understand the transition from an axial-based swimming to a limbed propulsion (Combes et al, 2004) These approaches have been done for total distance covered or kinematics analysis by drawing the body outline of the animal, making this method very inefficient and laborious, and not able to measure more complex parameters such as coordination, or compare slight changes in movement in different experimental conditions. This algorithm is a great improvement in quantitatively assessing any improvement in SCR after a given treatment This algorithm would allow the detection of slight improvements in swimming recovery compared to the current methods developed in our own lab that only allow the measurement of the distance swum by froglets (Gaete et al, 2012; Muñoz et al, 2015); a parameter that is too broad to allow the detection of small effects when screening for potential new treatments
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