Background: Self-grooming behavior in rodents serves as a valuable behavioral index for investigating stereotyped and perseverative responses. Most current grooming analyses rely on video observation, which lacks standardization, efficiency, and quantitative information about force. To address these limitations, we developed an automated paradigm to analyze grooming using a force-plate actometer.
New method: Grooming behavior is quantified by calculating ratios of relevant movement power spectral bands. These ratios are input into a naïve Bayes classifier, trained with manual video observations. The effectiveness of this method was tested using CIN-d mice, an animal model developed through early-life depletion of striatal cholinergic interneurons (CIN-d) and featuring prolonged grooming responses to acute stressors. Behavioral monitoring was simultaneously conducted on the force-place actometer and by video recording.
Results: The naïve Bayes approach achieved 93.7% accurate classification and an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.894. We confirmed that male CIN-d mice displayed significantly longer grooming durations than controls. However, this elevation was not correlated with increases in grooming force. Notably, the dopaminergic antagonist haloperidol reduced grooming force and duration.
Comparison with existing methods: In contrast to observation-based approaches, our method affords rapid, unbiased, and automated assessment of grooming duration, frequency, and force.
Conclusions: Our novel approach enables fast and accurate automated detection of grooming behaviors. This method holds promise for high-throughput assessments of grooming stereotypies in animal models of neuropsychiatric disorders.
Keywords: Animal models; Force-plate actometer; Grooming; Naïve Bayes classifier.
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