MouBeAT: A New and Open Toolbox for Guided Analysis of Behavioral Tests in Mice

Animal behavioral tests are essential to understand the bases of neurologic and psychological disorders, which can be evaluated by different methodological and experimental models. However, the quantification of behavioral tests results is limited by the considerable amount of time needed for manual...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience 2018-09, Vol.12, p.201-201
Main Authors: Bello-Arroyo, Elísabet, Roque, Hélio, Marcos, Alberto, Orihuel, Javier, Higuera-Matas, Alejandro, Desco, Manuel, Caiolfa, Valeria R, Ambrosio, Emilio, Lara-Pezzi, Enrique, Gómez-Gaviro, María Victoria
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Automation
Behavior
behavioral tests
ImageJ
Laboratory animals
Memory
Neuroscience
open source
Operating systems
rodents
semi-automated analysis
Software
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Summary:Animal behavioral tests are essential to understand the bases of neurologic and psychological disorders, which can be evaluated by different methodological and experimental models. However, the quantification of behavioral tests results is limited by the considerable amount of time needed for manual evaluation and the high costs of automated analysis software. To overcome these limitations, we describe here a new, open source toolbox for ImageJ, called Mouse Behavioral Analysis Toolbox (MouBeAT), designed to analyze different behavioral tests in rodents semi-automatically. These tests include Open Field (OF), Elevated Plus Maze (EPM), Y-maze (YM) test and Morris Water Maze (MWM). MouBeAT showed a high correlation with manual evaluation in all the parameters analyzed for all the behavioral tests, reinforcing its value as an accurate analysis tool. This new tool is freely available online.
ISSN:1662-5153
1662-5153
DOI:10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00201