MouBeAT: A New and Open Toolbox for Guided Analysis of Behavioral Tests in Mice

Overview

Journal Front Behav Neurosci

Specialty Psychology

Date 2018 Sep 25

PMID 30245618

Citations 18

Authors

Elisabet Bello-Arroyo

Helio Roque

Alberto Marcos

Javier Orihuel

Alejandro Higuera-Matas

Manuel Desco

Valeria R Caiolfa

Emilio Ambrosio

Enrique Lara-Pezzi

Maria Victoria Gomez-Gaviro

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Animal behavioral tests are essential to understand the bases of neurologic and psychological disorders, which can be evaluated by different methodological and experimental models. However, the quantification of behavioral tests results is limited by the considerable amount of time needed for manual evaluation and the high costs of automated analysis software. To overcome these limitations, we describe here a new, open source toolbox for ImageJ, called Mouse Behavioral Analysis Toolbox (MouBeAT), designed to analyze different behavioral tests in rodents semi-automatically. These tests include Open Field (OF), Elevated Plus Maze (EPM), Y-maze (YM) test and Morris Water Maze (MWM). MouBeAT showed a high correlation with manual evaluation in all the parameters analyzed for all the behavioral tests, reinforcing its value as an accurate analysis tool. This new tool is freely available online.

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