Long-term and continuous animal behavioral monitoring

Abstract

Systems and methods for continuous monitoring of the behavior of animals, such as small rodents, are provided. Monitoring can include video, audio, and other sensor modalities. In one embodiment, the system can include cameras, arena design, environmental sensors, and ultrasonic sensors. The system uniquely provides a continuous long-term monitoring system suitable for mouse behavioral study. Further provided is a neural network based tracker configured for use with video data acquired by the monitoring system. 3 different neural network architectures have been tested to determine their performance on genetically diverse mice under varying environmental conditions. It has been observed that that an encoder-decoder segmentation neural network achieves high accuracy and speed with minimal training data. This general purpose neural network tracker can be easily extended to other experimental paradigms and even to other animals through transfer learning, thus forming a robust, generalizable solution for bio-behavioral research.