A Neural Network Reveals Motoric Effects of Maternal Preconception Exposure to Nicotine on Rat Pup Behavior: A New Approach for Movement Disorders Diagnosis

Abstract

Neurodevelopmental disorders can stem from pharmacological, genetic, or environmental causes and early diagnosis is often a key to successful treatment. To improve early detection of neurological motor impairments, we developed a deep neural network for data-driven analyses. The network was applied to study the effect of maternal nicotine exposure prior to conception on 10-day-old rat pup motor behavior in an open field task. Female Long-Evans rats were administered nicotine (15 mg/L) in sweetened drinking water (1% sucralose) for seven consecutive weeks immediately prior to mating. The neural network outperformed human expert designed animal locomotion measures in distinguishing rat pups born to nicotine exposed dams vs. control dams (87 vs. 64% classification accuracy). Notably, the network discovered novel movement alterations in posture, movement initiation and a stereotypy in “warm-up” behavior (repeated movements along specific body dimensions) that were predictive of nicotine exposure. The results suggest novel findings that maternal preconception nicotine exposure delays and alters offspring motor development. Similar behavioral symptoms are associated with drug-related causes of disorders such as autism spectrum disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in human children. Thus, the identification of motor impairments in at-risk offspring here shows how neuronal networks can guide the development of more accurate behavioral tests to earlier diagnose symptoms of neurodevelopmental disorders in infants and children.

Using Generative and Explainable Neural Networks to Investigate the Relationship Between Motor Cortex Activity and Animal Behavior During Motor Task Learning.

“…A pre-trained Inception-V3 deep convolutional neural network (ConvNet) (Szegedy et al, 2016) extracted 2,048 high-level features from each frame. Originally trained on the ImageNet dataset, which includes images from 1,000 classes such as "dog," "car," and "make-up," this network demonstrated strong performance on behavioral datasets (Ryait et al, 2019, Torabi et al 2021. Each neuron was predicted separately (the median number of neurons per rat per session was 20 with a range from 6 to 51.…”

Can MiceGPT be True? A Survey on AI-empowered Mice Behavior Analysis Applications and Solutions

“…Marks et al [29] collect raw video frames in complex environments directly. Torabi et al [30] collect neonatal (10-days-old) rat pup video recordings using standard locomotor-derived kinematic measures. Martins et al [31] collected videos of the tail suspension test (TST) in a controlled environment.…”

“…Torabi et al [30] study the effect of maternal nicotine exposure before conception on 10-day-old rat pup motor behavior and propose a deep neural network by action recognition. They train the model for classifying the videos into maternal preconception nicotine exposed groups and control them.…”

“…Neurobehavioral Assessment [54] Semantic Segmentation, Key Point Detection SV-T [52] Image Classification SV-T [55] Image Classification SV-T [10] Semantic Segmentation, Action Recognition SV-T [56] Semantic Segmentation, Image Classification SV-F [53] Action Prediction SV-F [57] Semantic Segmentation SV-F Social Behavior Analysis [39] Object Detection, Action Recognition SV-S [47] Pose Estimation, Action Recognition MV-TFS [46] Pose Estimation, Action Recognition Object Tracing SV-T [40] Action Recognition, Key Point Detection MV-TS [48] Action Recognition MV-TS [38] Object Detection, Pose Estimation, Action recognition MV-TF External Stimuli Effective Assessment [25] Key Point Detection, Action Recognition MV-B [26] Pose Estimation SV-B [27] Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation, Image Classification SV-F [28] Action Recognition SV-T [29] Instance Segmentation, Key Point Detection, Object Tracing, Action Recognition SV-T [30] Action Recognition SV-T [31] Object Detection, Action Recognition SV-F [32] Object Tracing, Action Recognition SV-T Disease Detection [18] Semantic Segmentation, Action Recognition SV-B [16] Semantic Segmentation, Action Recognition SV-T [19] Key Point Detection, Pose Estimation MV-BS [20] Key Point Detection, Pose Estimation SV-S…”

On the growth and form of animal behavior

“…Maternal nicotine exposure prior to conception influences 10-day-old rat pup motor behavior in an open field task by inducing a stereotypy in their "warm-up" sequences: once making one lateral head movement they then repeat the movement at regular intervals rather than escalating warm-up movements into locomotion (Torabi et al, 2021).…”