Practical aspects of estimating energy components in rodents

Recently there has been an increasing interest in exploiting computational and statistical techniques for the purpose of component analysis of indirect calorimetry data. Using these methods it becomes possible to dissect daily energy expenditure into its components and to assess the dynamic response of the resting metabolic rate (RMR) to nutritional and pharmacological manipulations. To perform robust component analysis, however, is not straightforward and typically requires the tuning of parameters and the preprocessing of data. Moreover the degree of accuracy that can be attained by these methods depends on the configuration of the system, which must be properly taken into account when setting up experimental studies. Here, we review the methods of Kalman filtering, linear, and penalized spline regression, and minimal energy expenditure estimation in the context of component analysis and discuss their results on high resolution datasets from mice and rats. In addition, we investigate the effect of the sample time, the accuracy of the activity sensor, and the washout time of the chamber on the estimation accuracy. We found that on the high resolution data there was a strong correlation between the results of Kalman filtering and penalized spline (P-spline) regression, except for the activity respiratory quotient (RQ). For low resolution data the basal metabolic rate (BMR) and resting RQ could still be estimated accurately with P-spline regression, having a strong correlation with the high resolution estimate (R(2) > 0.997; sample time of 9 min). In contrast, the thermic effect of food (TEF) and activity related energy expenditure (AEE) were more sensitive to a reduction in the sample rate (R(2) > 0.97). In conclusion, for component analysis on data generated by single channel systems with continuous data acquisition both Kalman filtering and P-spline regression can be used, while for low resolution data from multichannel systems P-spline regression gives more robust results.