Automated maternal behavior during early life in rodents (AMBER) pipeline.

Sci Rep

Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, 108 E. Dean Keaton St, Austin, TX, 78712, USA.

Published: October 2023

Mother-infant interactions during the early postnatal period are critical for infant survival and the scaffolding of infant development. Rodent models are used extensively to understand how these early social experiences influence neurobiology across the lifespan. However, methods for measuring postnatal dam-pup interactions typically involve time-consuming manual scoring, vary widely between research groups, and produce low density data that limits downstream analytical applications. To address these methodological issues, we developed the Automated Maternal Behavior during Early life in Rodents (AMBER) pipeline for quantifying home-cage maternal and mother-pup interactions using open-source machine learning tools. DeepLabCut was used to track key points on rat dams (32 points) and individual pups (9 points per pup) in postnatal day 1-10 video recordings. Pose estimation models reached key point test errors of approximately 4.1-10 mm (14.39 pixels) and 3.44-7.87 mm (11.81 pixels) depending on depth of animal in the frame averaged across all key points for dam and pups respectively. Pose estimation data and human-annotated behavior labels from 38 videos were used with Simple Behavioral Analysis (SimBA) to generate behavior classifiers for dam active nursing, passive nursing, nest attendance, licking and grooming, self-directed grooming, eating, and drinking using random forest algorithms. All classifiers had excellent performance on test frames, with F scores above 0.886. Performance on hold-out videos remained high for nest attendance (F = 0.990), active nursing (F = 0.828), and licking and grooming (F = 0.766) but was lower for eating, drinking, and self-directed grooming (F = 0.534-0.554). A set of 242 videos was used with AMBER and produced behavior measures in the expected range from postnatal 1-10 home-cage videos. This pipeline is a major advancement in assessing home-cage dam-pup interactions in a way that reduces experimenter burden while increasing reproducibility, reliability, and detail of data for use in developmental studies without the need for special housing systems or proprietary software.

Download full-text PDF

Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10600172PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-45495-4DOI Listing

Publication Analysis

Top Keywords

automated maternal
8
maternal behavior
8
behavior early
8
early life
8
life rodents
8
rodents amber
8
amber pipeline
8
dam-pup interactions
8
key points
8
pose estimation
8

Similar Publications

Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?

Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!