Investigation of experimental mice husbandry microenvironment and animal health in individual ventilated cage (IVC)

Abstract

This work investigates the husbandry microenvironment and health status of experimental mice to help create a suitable husbandry microenvironment for experimental animals, with the aim of ensuring the quality and animal welfare of experimental mice through a suitable husbandry microenvironment. Experimental measurements and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) are used to analyze the husbandry microenvironment of experimental mice, and indicators for judging the health status and husbandry microenvironments of experimental mice are proposed. The results show that the correlation between the health state of mice and abdominal heat flux reaches 0.786 (p = 0.01), and there is a significant difference between the environmental evaluation indexes of healthy and sick mice. The relationship between the mice and the husbandry microenvironments could be characterized by the Cbs number, i.e.，Cbs number is defined as the biological surface convective heat transfer number of the microenvironment, and the value of Cbs number of the healthy mice could be referred to as about 0.3334. This is of guiding significance for the judgment of the health of experimental animals and the creation of a suitable husbandry microenvironment for experimental animals.