Real-time and Long-time Quantification of Behavior of Laboratory Mice Scratching

A novel real-time motion analysis system was developed for detecting the scratching behavior of laboratory mice in long-time experiments, which enables automated behavior quantification for new drug development in diseases such as atopic dermatitis and so on. This system can detect quick movements of laboratory mice, such as scratching, by introducing a specially designed high-speed vision system that can calculate the frame-to-frame difference at a frame rate of 240 fps (frames per second). Quantification algorithm was also implemented for distinguishing scratching behavior from other behaviors. In fact, we evaluated the effectiveness of our system by demonstrating the experimental results of scratching behavior detection during long-time observation of several ICR mice.