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A novel rat head gaze determination system based on optomotor responses

The optomotor response of animals is commonly used to measure their visual performance, e.g., rats of different genetically altered strains or various drug tests. With the presentation of stimuli using computer screens or projectors, the common idea focuses on measuring the eye movement or head and/...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: You, Mengbo, Yamane, Toshiyuki, Tomita, Hiroshi, Sugano, Eriko, Akashi, Takuya
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5405982/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28445553
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0176633
Descripción
Sumario:The optomotor response of animals is commonly used to measure their visual performance, e.g., rats of different genetically altered strains or various drug tests. With the presentation of stimuli using computer screens or projectors, the common idea focuses on measuring the eye movement or head and/or body movement to characterize changes of the head gaze. However, traditional methods rely on either the invasive fixation of animals, or the judgment of a human observer who reports the stimulus-tracking movements. In this paper, we propose a novel head gaze determination system to automatically track the head movement of rats without artificial markers. The experiments were done to demonstrate the process of optimizing parameters in image processing. As a result, the head angle curve of the proposed method is consistent with that of ground-truth data annotated manually according to predefined rules. Hence, the proposed method provides a simple, convenient, and objective solution to automatically generate the head gaze orientations from massive amounts of recorded data for further visual performance analysis.