Non-intrusive high throughput automated data collection from the home cage

Fabio Iannello

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2019.e01454

Abstract

Automated home cage monitoring represents a key technology to collect animal activity information directly from the home cage. The availability of 24/7 cage data enables extensive and quantitative assessment of mouse behavior and activity over long periods of time than possible otherwise. When home cage monitoring is performed directly at the home cage rack, it is possible to leverage additional advantages, including, e.g., partial (or total) reduction of animal handling, no need for setting up external data collection system as well as not requiring dedicated labs and personnel to perform tests. In this work we introduce a home cage-home rack monitoring system that is capable of continuously detecting spontaneous animal activity occurring in the home cage directly from the home cage rack. The proposed system is based on an electrical capacitance sensing technology that enables non-intrusive and continuous home cage monitoring. We then present a few animal activity metrics that are validated via comparison against a video camera-based tracking system. The results show that the proposed home-cage monitoring system can provide animal activity metrics that are comparable to the ones derived via a conventional video tracking system, with the advantage of system scalability, limited amount of both data generated and computational capabilities required to derive metrics.

Highlights

Article No~e01454Automated home cage monitoring represents a key technology to measure spontaneous animal activity in rodents as it enables researchers to monitor animals over long periods of time without human intervention
The results show that the proposed home-cage monitoring system can provide animal activity metrics that are comparable to the ones derived via a conventional video tracking system, with the advantage of system scalability, limited amount of both data generated and computational capabilities required to derive metrics
The distances covered by the mouse in each video block measured with the proposed capacitance sensing technology (CST)-based home cage monitoring system and video tracking (CST distance and video distance in short), respectively, are shown in the left panels (a), (c) and (e) of Figure 4 versus time for all the three cages, whereas correlation is analyzed via the scatter plots shown in panels (b), (d) and (f)

Summary

Introduction

Article No~e01454Automated home cage monitoring represents a key technology to measure spontaneous animal activity in rodents as it enables researchers to monitor animals over long periods of time without human intervention. Monitoring home cages 24/7 enables the collection of data related to animal activity and behaviors, potentially spanning across several weeks, months or the entire animal life, which would otherwise be lost as not recorded. This provides a completely new set of information available to scientists (see e.g., discussion in [4, 5]). Each technology has its own trade-offs, for example, camera-based systems potentially have the advantage of providing detailed images and the capability to observe animal locomotion and behaviors [6, 13], with main limitations being system scalability when the number of cages to observe becomes large (e.g., in terms of generated data), computational power and mechanical set up. Other systems require ad-hoc mechanical set up, which could limit scalability and potentially require dedicated personnel for starting up the system [14]

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