Abstract
Mice are the most commonly used model animals for itch research and for development of anti-itch drugs. Most laboratories manually quantify mouse scratching behavior to assess itch intensity. This process is labor-intensive and limits large-scale genetic or drug screenings. In this study, we developed a new system, Scratch-AID (Automatic Itch Detection), which could automatically identify and quantify mouse scratching behavior with high accuracy. Our system included a custom-designed videotaping box to ensure high-quality and replicable mouse behavior recording and a convolutional recurrent neural network trained with frame-labeled mouse scratching behavior videos, induced by nape injection of chloroquine. The best trained network achieved 97.6% recall and 96.9% precision on previously unseen test videos. Remarkably, Scratch-AID could reliably identify scratching behavior in other major mouse itch models, including the acute cheek model, the histaminergic model, and a chronic itch model. Moreover, our system detected significant differences in scratching behavior between control and mice treated with an anti-itch drug. Taken together, we have established a novel deep learning-based system that could replace manual quantification for mouse scratching behavior in different itch models and for drug screening.
Keywords:
automatic quantification; deep learning; itch; mouse; mouse behavior; neuroscience; scratching.
© 2022, Yu, Xiong et al.
Publication types
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Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
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Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
MeSH terms
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Animals
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Behavior, Animal
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Chloroquine / pharmacology
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Deep Learning*
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Disease Models, Animal
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Injections
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Mice
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Pruritus / chemically induced
Associated data
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Dryad/10.5061/dryad.mw6m9060s