SCORHE: A novel and practical approach to video monitoring of laboratory mice housed in vivarium cage racks

Abstract

The System for Continuous Observation of Rodents in Home-cage Environment (SCORHE) was developed to demonstrate the viability of compact and scalable designs for quantifying activity levels and behavior patterns for mice housed within a commercial ventilated cage rack. The SCORHE in-rack design provides day- and night-time monitoring with the consistency and convenience of the home-cage environment. The dual-video camera custom hardware design makes efficient use of space, does not require home-cage modification, and is animal-facility user-friendly. Given the system’s low cost and suitability for use in existing vivariums without modification to the animal husbandry procedures or housing setup, SCORHE opens up the potential for the wider use of automated video monitoring in animal facilities. SCORHE’s potential uses include day-to-day health monitoring, as well as advanced behavioral screening and ethology experiments, ranging from the assessment of the short- and long-term effects of experimental cancer treatments to the evaluation of mouse models. When used for phenotyping and animal model studies, SCORHE aims to eliminate the concerns often associated with many mouse-monitoring methods, such as circadian rhythm disruption, acclimation periods, lack of night-time measurements, and short monitoring periods. Custom software integrates two video streams to extract several mouse activity and behavior measures. Studies comparing the activity levels of ABCB5 knockout and HMGN1 overexpresser mice with their respective C57BL parental strains demonstrate SCORHE’s efficacy in characterizing the activity profiles for singly- and doubly-housed mice. Another study was conducted to demonstrate the ability of SCORHE to detect a change in activity resulting from administering a sedative.

The High-throughput WAFFL System for Treating and Monitoring Individual Drosophila melanogaster Adults

“…We placed the MUFFIN inside the same incubator as the WAFFL experiments to make the conditions consistent. In our current work, the conditions were an average (Salem et al 2015).…”

Low-Cost Solution for Rodent Home-Cage Behaviour Monitoring

“…So far, we have presented our system using a single camera which can provide a topdown view or side-view perspective of the animal cage. However, using only one camera can present some problems: for example, insufficient mouse shape detail, reduced accuracy of tracking multiple mice, and detection of mice in images due to frequent changes in bedding position and appearance [34]. Thus, multiple PiCameras can be used to mitigate these issues.…”

“…This would allow researchers to study the relationship between brain activity and behaviour in a less experimenter-biased and automated manner [49,53]. Another possible interesting avenue to explore with our system could be the study of social behaviour using multiple animals in the same cage [34].…”

Noise Cancellation Methods for Wearable Devices using Microprocessors

“…Video monitoring has been one of the most active research topics in computer vision area [1][2][3][4]. Systems employing captured video as input signal have a wide range of applications such as for crime prevention [5], traffic control [6], dangerous prediction and detection [7], and monitoring children and elderly people at home [8] [9].…”