Automated Rodent Tracker (ART)

Robyn Grant, from Manchester Metropolitan University, has shared the following with Open Behavior regarding the development of an automated rodent tracking (ART) program:

We have developed a program, ART, that can automatically track rodent position and movement. It is able to track head movements, body movements and also aspects of body size. It is able to identify certain behaviours from video footage too, such as rotations, moving forwards, interacting with objects and staying still. Our program is really flexible, so it can have additional modules that can be easily “plugged in”. For example, at the moment, it has a manual tracker module, which allows for your automatic tracking to be validated with manual tracking points (using MWA: Hewitt, Yap & Grant 2016, Journal of Open Research Software). This versatility means that in the future other modules might be added, such as additional behaviour identifiers, or other trackers such as for feet or whiskers.

Our program, ART, is also very automatic. It has minimal user input, but still performs as well as other trackers that require a lot of manual processing. It can automatically find video frames where the mouse is present and will only track these frames; or you can specify to track only when the mouse is locomoting, or rotating, for example. We hope that this tracker will form a solid basis from which to investigate rodent behaviour further.

This research tool was created by your colleagues. Please acknowledge the Principal Investigator, cite the article in which the tool was described, and include an RRID in the Materials and Methods of your future publications.  Project portal RRID:SCR_021432; Software RRID:SCR_021510