Tag: python

Autopilot

DECEMBER 12, 2019

Jonny Saunders from Michael Wehr’s lab at the University of Oregon recently posted a preprint documenting their project Autopilot, which is a python framework for running behavioral experiments:

Autopilot is a python framework for behavioral experiments through utilizing Raspberry Pi microcontrollers. Autopilot incorporates all aspects of an experiment, including the hardware, stimuli, behavioral task paradigm, data management, data visualization, and a user interface. The authors propose that Autopilot is the fastest, least expensive, most flexibile behavioral system that is currently available.

The benefit of using Autopilot is that it allows more experimental flexibility, which lets researchers to optimize it for their specific experimental needs. Additionally, this project exemplifies how useful a raspberry pi can be for performing experiments and recording data. The preprint discusses many benefits of raspberry pis, including their speed, precision and proper data logging, and they only cost $35 (!!). Ultimately, the authors developed Autopilot in an effort to encourage users to write reusable, portable experiments that is put into a public central library to push replication and reproducibility.

 

For more information, check out their presentation or the Autopilot website here.

Additionally documentation is here, along with a github repo, and a link to their preprint is here.

Saunders, J. L., & Wehr, M. (2019). Autopilot: Automating behavioral experiments with lots of Raspberry Pis. bioRxiv, 807693.

Ratcave

AUGUST 29, 2019

Nicholas A. Del Grosso and Anton Sirota at the Bernstein Centre for Computational Neuroscience recently published their new project called Ratcave, a Python 3D graphics library that allows researchers to create and 3D stimuli in their experiments:

Neuroscience experiments often require the use of software to present stimuli to a subject and subsequently record their responses. Many current libraries lack 3D graphic support necessary for psychophysics experiments. While python and other programming languages may have 3D graphics libraries, it is hard to integrate these into psychophysics libraries without modification. In order to increase programming of 3D graphics suitable for the existing environment of Python software, the authors developed Ratcave.

Ratcave is an open-source, cross-platform Python library that adds 3D stimulus support to all OpenGL-based 2D Python stimulus libraries. These libraries include VisionEgg, Psychopy, Pyglet, and PyGam. Ratcave comes with resources including basic 3D object primitives and wide range of 3D light effects. Ratcave’s intuitive object-oriented interface allows for all objects, which include meshes, lights, and cameras, can be repositioned, rotated, and scaled. Objects can also be parented to one another to specify complex relationships of objects. By sending the data as a single array using OpenGL’s VAO (Vertex Array Object) functionality, the processing of drawing much more efficient. This approach allows over 30,000 vertices to be rendered at a performance level surpassing the needs of most behavioral research studies.

An advantage of Ratcave is that it allows researchers to continue to use their preferred libraries, since Ratcave supplements existing python stimulus libraries, making it easy to add on 3d stimuli to current libraries. The manuscript also reports that Ratcave has been tested and implemented in other’s research, actively showing reproducibility across labs and experiments.

Details on the hardware and software can be found at https://github.com/ratcave/ratcave.

Information on Ratcave can also be found on the https://ratcave.readthedocs.org.

Del Grosso, N. A., & Sirota, A. (2019). Ratcave: A 3D graphics python package for cognitive psychology experiments. Behavior research methods, 1-9.

ezTrack

June 13, 2019

Zach Pennington from Denise Cai’s lab at Mt. Sinai recently posted a preprint describing their latest open-source project called ezTrack:

ezTrack is an open-source, platform independent set of behavior analysis pipelines using interactive Python (iPython/Jupyter Notebook) that researchers with no prior programming experience can use. ezTrack is a sigh of relief for researchers with little to no computer programming experience. Behavioral tracking analysis shouldn’t be limited to those with extensive programming knowledge, and ezTrack is a nice alternative to currently available software that may require a bit more programming experience. The manuscript and Jupyter notebooks are written in the style of a tutorial, and is meant to provide straightforward instructions to the user on implementing ezTrack. ezTrack is unique from other recent video analysis toolboxes in that this method does not use deep learning algorithms and thus does not require training sets for transfer learning.

ezTrack can be used to analyze rodent behavior videos of a single animal in different settings, and the authors provide examples of positional analysis across several tasks (place-preference, water-maze, open-field, elevated plus maze, light-dark boxes, etc), as well as analysis of freezing behavior. ezTrack can provide frame-by-frame data output in .csv files, and users can crop the frames of the video to get rid of any issue with cables from optogenetic or electrophysiology experiments. ezTrack can take on multiple different video formats, such as mpg1, wav, avi, and more.

Aside from the benefit of being open-source, there are several major advantages of ezTrack. Notably, the tool is user-friendly in that it is accessible to researchers with little to no programming background. The user does not need to make many adjustments to parameters of the toolbox, and the data can processed into interactive visualizations and is easily extractable in .csv files. ezTrack is both operating system and hardware independent and can be used across multiple platforms. Utilizing ipython/Jupyter Notebook allows researchers to easily replicate their analyses as well.

Check out their GitHub with more details on how to use ezTrack: https://github.com/denisecailab/ezTrack

Pennington, Z. T., Dong, Z., Bowler, R., Feng, Y., Vetere, L. M., Shuman, T., & Cai, D. J. (2019). ezTrack: An open-source video analysis pipeline for the investigation of animal behavior. BioRxiv, 592592.