EthoWatcher

In Computers in Biology and Medicine, Carlos Fernando Crispin Jr. and colleagues share their software EthoWatcher: a computational tool that supports video-tracking, detailed ethography, and extraction of kinematic variables from video files of laboratory animals.

The freely available EthoWatcher software has two modules: a tracking module and an ethography module. The tracking module permits the controlled separation of the target from its background, the extraction of image attributes used to calculate distances traveled, orientation, length, area and a path graph of the target. The ethography module allows recording of catalog-based behaviors from video files, the environment, or frame-by-frame. The output reports latency, frequency, and duration of each behavior as well as the sequence of events in a time-segmented format fixed by the user. EthoWatcher was validated conducting tests on the detection of the known behavioral effects of drugs and on kinematic measurements.

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_021435; Software RRID:SCR_021504