CAMBRIDGE PHENOTYPING SMART-KAGE SYSTEM

Procurement Summary

. The NHLBI Murine Phenotyping Core needs the smart-Kage system to conduct activity, and behavioral phenotyping in home cage environments for core projects. The current home cage activity monitoring system being used in the lab is old and outdated. Additionally, 2 out of the 8 arenas are no longer functioning. The cage’s cameras and lids are outdated and being phased out and the newer version cameras are not compatible with the software running in the current system. This means that all 8 cages must be replaced at once so that experiments may be run simultaneously. The Cambridge Phenotyping Smart-Kage system is a fully automated home cage system allowing for both cognitive and behavioral phenotyping of mice. This system uses IR top mounted cameras to monitor mouse movement and behavior which is analyzed and interpreted through CNN deep learning based technology for robust phenotypic characterization in models. The Cambridge Phenotyping smart-Kages are the only available home-cage monitoring system for fully automated comprehensive cognitive and behavioral phenotyping of individually housed mice, compatible with long-term experiments. The Smart-Kages, incorporate multi-body point analysis of the animals, random forest classifiers to assign behavioral labels, behavioral parameters to predict underlying mouse phenotype using agglomerative hierarchical clustering, for more robust behavioral characterization and applications. No other mouse home cage monitoring systems utilizes this robust AI based technology. The closest alternative to the Cambridge Phenotyping smart-Kage system uses a surgically implanted transmitter which tracks animal location in cages by RFID antennas. Therefore this system is only capable of location tracking. In comparison, the smart-Kage utilizes IR cameras and multipoint tracking to monitor location, movement patterns, body positions, which can then be used by an AI based analysis tool using CNN and random forest classifiers to assign behavioral labels, and then behavioral parameters can predict underlying phenotypes using agglomerative (hierarchical) clustering. The Smart-Kages are fully automated home-cage monitoring system for both cognitive and behavioral phenotyping and the home cages include within their design and components along with the AI based technology that ability to additionally test T-maze alternation with variable inter-trial intervals, novel object recognition and object in place recognition tests, place preference learning, associative learning, light/dark preference, locomotion, running wheels, quiescence, water intake for robust behavioral and cognitive testing of mice in their home cage environment. The Cambridge smart-Kage is the only system available that allows cognitive and activity testing utilizing long term 24/7 IR video based monitoring at 2Hz, multipoint body/position tracking and AI-based software for monitoring and controlling experimental pipeline and data analysis. Cognitive tasks include T-maze-like alternation (“smart T-maze”), novel object recognition (“smart NOR”), and object-in-place recognition (“smart OPR”) tasks carried out continuously and simultaneously in the smart-Kage without any interference from the experimenter and the system monitors an animal’s position, water consumption, quiescence, and locomotion. This is the only smart cage system utilizing AI related technology, the videos are analyzed using CNN and random forest classifiers assigned to behavioral labels, and then behavioral parameters can predict underlying phenotypes using agglomerative (hierarchical) clustering.

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