A novel rat head gaze determination system based on optomotor responses

The optomotor response of animals is commonly used to measure their visual performance, e.g., rats of different genetically altered strains or various drug tests. With the presentation of stimuli using computer screens or projectors, the common idea focuses on measuring the eye movement or head and/...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2017-04, Vol.12 (4), p.e0176633-e0176633
Main Authors: You, Mengbo, Yamane, Toshiyuki, Tomita, Hiroshi, Sugano, Eriko, Akashi, Takuya
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Albinism
Analysis
Animal experimentation
Animals
Automation
Behavior
Biology and Life Sciences
Color
Design
Engineering and Technology
Engineering schools
Eye
Eye movements
Fixation
Gaze
Head
Head - physiology
Head movement
Head Movements
Image processing
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
Light
Medicine and Health Sciences
Mice
Movement
Neurosciences
Optometry
Optomotor response
Photic Stimulation
Physical Sciences
Process parameters
Projectors
Rats
Research and Analysis Methods
Rodents
Science
Social Sciences
Stimuli (Psychology)
Tracking
User-Computer Interface
Visual perception
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The optomotor response of animals is commonly used to measure their visual performance, e.g., rats of different genetically altered strains or various drug tests. With the presentation of stimuli using computer screens or projectors, the common idea focuses on measuring the eye movement or head and/or body movement to characterize changes of the head gaze. However, traditional methods rely on either the invasive fixation of animals, or the judgment of a human observer who reports the stimulus-tracking movements. In this paper, we propose a novel head gaze determination system to automatically track the head movement of rats without artificial markers. The experiments were done to demonstrate the process of optimizing parameters in image processing. As a result, the head angle curve of the proposed method is consistent with that of ground-truth data annotated manually according to predefined rules. Hence, the proposed method provides a simple, convenient, and objective solution to automatically generate the head gaze orientations from massive amounts of recorded data for further visual performance analysis.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0176633