DBscorer: An Open-Source Software for Automated Accurate Analysis of Rodent Behavior in Forced Swim Test and Tail Suspension Test

Forced swim test (FST) and tail suspension test (TST) are commonly used behavioral tests for screening antidepressant drugs with a high predictive validity. These tests have also proved useful to assess the non-motor symptoms in the animal models of movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease. Manual analysis of FST and TST is a time-consuming exercise and has large observer-to-observer variability. Automation of behavioral analysis alleviates these concerns, but there are no easy-to-use open-source tools for such analysis. Here, we describe the development of Depression Behavior Scorer (DBscorer), an open-source program installable on Windows, with an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), that helps in accurate quantification of immobility behavior in FST and TST from video analysis. Several calibration options allow customization of various parameters to suit the experimental requirements. Apart from the readout of time spent immobile, DBscorer also provides additional data and graphics of immobility/mobility states across time revealing the evolution of behavioral despair over the duration of the test and allows the analysis of additional parameters. Such comprehensive analysis allows a more nuanced understanding of the expression of behavioral despair in FST and TST. We believe that DBscorer would make analysis of behavior in FST and TST unbiased, automated and rapid, and hence prove to be helpful to the wider neuroscience community.