Abstract
BackgroundLaboratory rats play a critical role in research because they provide a biological model that can be used for evaluating the affectation of diseases and injuries, and for the evaluation of the effectiveness of new drugs and treatments. The analysis of locomotion in laboratory rats facilitates the understanding of motor defects in many diseases, as well as the damage and recovery after peripheral and central nervous system injuries. However, locomotion analysis of rats remains a great challenge due to the necessity of labor intensive manual annotations of video data required to obtain quantitative measurements of the kinematics of the rodent extremities. In this work, we present a method that is based on the use of a bio-inspired algorithm that fits a kinematic model of the hind limbs of rats to binary images corresponding to the segmented marker of images corresponding to the rat’s gait. The bio-inspired algorithm combines a genetic algorithm for a group of the optimization variables with a local search for a second group of the optimization variables.ResultsOur results indicate the feasibility of employing the proposed approach for the automatic annotation and analysis of the locomotion patterns of the posterior extremities of laboratory rats.ConclusionsThe adjustment of the hind limb kinematic model to markers of the video frames corresponding to rat’s gait sequences could then be used to analyze the motion patterns during the steps, which, in turn, can be useful for performing quantitative evaluations of the effect of lesions and treatments on rats models.
Highlights
Laboratory rats play a critical role in research because they provide a biological model that can be used for evaluating the affectation of diseases and injuries, and for the evaluation of the effectiveness of new drugs and treatments [1,2,3]
We present a method that is based on the use of a bio-inspired algorithm that fits a kinematic model of the Methods The proposed method is based on the adjustment of a rat hind limb kinematic model to a frame in a rat’s gait video sequence, where the hind limb of the rat has been marked with line-marks corresponding to the the rat’s leg bones ( Fig. 1a)
Leg widths are meaningless for the kinematic model, there are useful for the sake of fitting the virtual model to the video frames
Summary
Laboratory rats play a critical role in research because they provide a biological model that can be used for evaluating the affectation of diseases and injuries, and for the evaluation of the effectiveness of new drugs and treatments. The analysis of locomotion in laboratory rats facilitates the understanding of motor defects in many diseases, as well as the damage and recovery after peripheral and central nervous system injuries. Conclusions: The adjustment of the hind limb kinematic model to markers of the video frames corresponding to rat’s gait sequences could be used to analyze the motion patterns during the steps, which, in turn, can be useful for performing quantita‐ tive evaluations of the effect of lesions and treatments on rats models. For some research cases, these strategies may be unsuitable, since the movement of the rats could be different from their normal locomotion patterns [9] For these cases, unforced methods may be a better option with the main disadvantage that the comparison of the gait variables would require a more elaborated metric, exclusion of samples, or a normalization of the data
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