Method and Apparatus for Automatic Monitoring, Tracking and Cataloging of Behaving Animals in Home Cages

Unmet Need
In neurobehavioral analysis, many test mechanisms have been developed to allow for accurate assessment. Monitoring mouse social behaviors is one of the more important neurobehavioral analyses. However, classical behavioral testing of disease models is time-consuming and labor intensive while also being vulnerable to human handling error. There is a need to remove the human element that causes issues and inaccuracies in processing phenotyping and behavioral testing within the home cage environment. Due to the extensive use of mice for disease modeling brings a need for a computational system that is able to analyze and classify their social behavior to remove human element mistakes. There is an unmet need for an automated system to improve efficiency and accuracy of mouse model analysis, which in turn will improve overall disease discovery improvement in several different diseases.

Technology Overview
The inventors have developed a state-of-the-art monitoring and automated tracking system that is able to identify mice and track their identities frame by frame. This lays the groundwork for automatic social behavior analysis. The inventors specifically have found that mice have been the big limit of the state-of-the-art systems due to the difficulty of tracking individual animals. This technology addresses several unmet needs, such as automating the entire process along with developing a sophisticated algorithm for identity preservation of mice in disease analysis of behavioral and neurological assessment. The technology has proven to achieve over 80% accuracy on metal ear tags identification for full minute long video recordings.

Stage of Development
The inventors have developed an automated tracking system for identification of tagged mice for automatic social behavior. They are currently working to grow and exploit the system to be more accurate and implementable in more situations.

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