automated tracking of whiskers in videos of head fixed rodents自动跟踪的胡须的视频头固定的啮齿动物.pdf

Automated Tracking of Whiskers in Videos of Head Fixed Rodents Nathan G. Clack*, Daniel H. O’Connor, Daniel Huber, Leopoldo Petreanu, Andrew Hires, Simon Peron, Karel Svoboda, Eugene W. Myers Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, Virginia, United States of America Abstract We have developed software for fully automated tracking of vibrissae (whiskers) in high-speed videos (.500 Hz) of head- fixed, behaving rodents trimmed to a single row of whiskers. Performance was assessed against a manually curated dataset consisting of 1.32 million video frames comprising 4.5 million whisker traces. The current implementation detects whiskers with a recall of 99.998% and identifies individual whiskers with 99.997% accuracy. The average processing rate for these images was 8 Mpx/s/cpu (2.6 GHz Intel Core2, 2 GB RAM). This translates to 35 processed frames per second for a 640 px 6352 px video of 4 whiskers. The speed and accuracy achieved enables quantitative behavioral studies where the analysis of millions of video frames is required. We used the software to analyze the evolving whisking strategies as mice learned a whisker-based detection task over the course of 6 days (8148 trials, 25 million frames) and measure the forces at the sensory follicle that most underlie haptic perception. Citation: Clack NG, O’Connor DH, Huber D, Petreanu L, Hires A, et al. (2012) Automated Tracking of Whiskers in Videos of Head Fixed Rodents. PLoS Comput Biol 8(7): e1002591. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002591 Editor: Andreas Prlic, University of California, San Diego, United States of America Received January 23, 2012; Accepted May 12, 2012; Published July 5, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Clack et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unres