DSRScan
DSRScan is a part of our SocialScan Suite, and is also a part of our DepressionScan Suite. DSRScan quantitatively and qualitatively measures one type of social behavior of two (2) animals that are competing for a reward (food) in a specially designed device. This product captures and tracks two (2) animals (mice or rats) in the device, and automatically determines which animal exhibits dominance behavior and which animal exhibits submissive behaviors. Dominant-subordinate behavior in animals, as determined in laboratory studies, can be used to model depression and mania in humans.
Product Description [PDF opens in new window]
This tool supports automated analysis of dominance and submissiveness, which are defined in a competition test and measured as the relative success of two food-restricted animals (rats or mice) to gain access to a feeder (e.g., milk pool). Submissive behavior for one subject can be objectively measured as the amount of time spent at the feeder relative to that by the paired dominant animal. During the testing period, each feeding event by a specific subject is automatically detected and calculated with regard to its length of time. Test results are output to Excel files and statistics are calculated.
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Our DSRScan has several unique and important features in analyzing dominance/submissive behaviors among animals. First, the system recognizes each animal reliably, identifies its entire body and important body parts such as head, tail, positions of forelimbs and hind limbs, and genital part, rather that tracking the colors marked on animal’s body.
Second, the system, as a result of identifying animal’s body parts, makes sure that only when animal’s mouth is in contact with the food feeder is counted as a feeding event. When the animal’s body is close to the feeder, but the mouth is not in contact with the feeder is not counted, which often happens when a system that tracks the colors marked on the animals’ bodies.
System Requirements
- Windows-based PC (XP, 2000)
- Intel high-speed processor (Pentium 4 or better)
- Special videocard for real-time analysis
- Large HDD capacity for storage
- Good lighting conditions
- IR camera or red light for dark experiments
- Video-multiplexer for multi-camera feed
Third, the system can differentiate two (2) mice without artificially coloring (marking) them, as long as they have some slight difference in terms of color or contrast or sizes. The system will automatically determine who is who, even after two (2) animals get together and then depart from each other.
DSRScan is essentially a partial combination of the SocialScanTop and MazeScan products. It incorporates some events from each of those two products. DSRScan detects Social Contact as well as the Area event where, the user can detect an event based on a body part of an animal being in a special area, such as the nose being in the milk receptacle.
Combined with our other products such as SocialScanTop, the system can even further automatically identify courtship of these two animals, and will determine the social interactions of approach, avoidance, sniffing, and contact based on the automatically detected heads and tails of animals, and their relative spatial positions and movements.
The techniques for automation of the quantification of Dominance-Submissiveness relationship between animals have been applied to achieve high throughput screening. System architecture for high throughput screening has been designed that involves analysis up to 16 pairs of animals and 16 devices per computer.
The High-Throughput product option is necessary to analyze more than a single arena simultaneously. The Realtime Option is necessary to perform realtime analysis where the live video feed into the computer is compressed, encoded, saved to the hard drive while simultaneously full analysis of the video is performed.
Many advanced features are incorporated, including supporting full color analysis, automatic adaptation to non-uniform or changing environment, automated handling of light/dark areas, variable speed playback of specific video segment for specific detected behavior, etc.
Complete turnkey systems (including all necessary hardware and software) are available. Custom design of your environment to facilitate analysis, including lighting condition setup, IR/red light setup, cage enclosures, video integration, and video-feed to computer is also available.