The mechanism of psychiatric drugs (stimulant and non-stimulant) is still unclear. Precision medication of psychiatric disorders faces challenges in pharmacogenetics and pharmacodynamics research due to difficulties in recruiting human subjects because of possibility of substance abuse and relatively small sample sizes. Drosophila is a powerful animal model for large-scale studies of drug effects based on the precise quantification of behavior. However, a user-friendly system for high-throughput simultaneous tracking and analysis of drug-treated individual adult flies is still lacking. It is critical to quickly setup a working environment including both the hardware and software at a reasonable cost. Thus, we have developed EasyFlyTracker, an open-source Python package that can track single fruit fly in each arena and analyze Drosophila locomotor and sleep activity based on video recording to facilitate revealing the psychiatric drug effects. The current version does not support multiple fruit fly tracking. Compared with existing software, EasyFlyTracker has the advantages of low cost, easy setup and scaling, rich statistics of movement trajectories, and compatibility with different video recording systems. Also, it accepts multiple video formats such as common MP4 and AVI formats. EasyFlyTracker provides a cross-platform and user-friendly interface combining command line and graphic configurations, which allows users to intuitively understand the process of tracking and downstream analyses and automatically generates multiple files, especially plots. Users can install EasyFlyTracker, go through tutorials, and give feedback on http://easyflytracker.cibr.ac.cn. Moreover, we tested EasyFlyTracker in a study of Drosophila melanogaster on the hyperactivity-like behavior effects of two psychiatric drugs, methylphenidate and atomoxetine, which are two commonly used drugs treating attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in human. This software has the potential to accelerate basic research on drug effect studies with fruit flies.

Graphics, uncertainty, and semantics are three approaches to building models. The combination of the three approaches is a way to develop a stronger modeling method.This article surveys the research efforts toward combining these aspects, which can be divided into two routes: One is to combine graphics and uncertainty as probabilistic graphical models and then incorporate semantics, and the other is to combine graphics and semantics and then incorporate probability to handle uncertainty. The models and methods involved in these efforts are introduced and their expressiveness, pros, and cons are discussed.

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