New technology to communicate biological information to artificial intelligence agents: development of digital homecage system for biomedical and pharmaceutical research

将生物信息传递给人工智能代理的新技术：用于生物医学和药物研究的数字家庭笼系统的开发

• 批准号: 560827-2020
• 负责人: Mohajerani, Majid
• 金额: $ 3.64万
• 依托单位: University of Lethbridge
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Alliance Grants
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2021-01-01 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=721820
• 关键词: New; technology; communicate; biological; information

Our project addresses gaps in current essential activities involving research animals: (1) rodent models are still the most common for biomedical and pharmacological studies related to disease, including highly infectious agents and toxic substances. Nonetheless, studies involve direct contact with experimental animals with risk mitigation by personal protective equipment. This is expensive and creates continuing health risk; (2) experimental data collection to study rodent health status, behaviour and rodent training for behavioural tasks are always carried out in specialized and expensive apparatus, separate from their homecage, usually in another dedicated room. This approach is a time consuming and labour intensive process and is a major constraint in collecting and managing large volumes of data both in density and in extension within behavioural space. Rodent handling causes inevitable stress which can be a confound in many studies. In addition, it reduces the reproducibility of finding due to unavoidable human error during both animal training and data collection and analysis. We propose to develop a product which is a digital cage, an automated system for animal behaviour data collection and analysis in their homecage for behavioural phenotyping using artificial intelligence. Our system is based on a low-cost combination of video camera and sensors that make our system highly modular and scalable for automated and remote high-throughput data collection and analysis. Our system can be easily adapted to existing animal facility infrastructure to automatize husbandry processes and also to carry out large scale long--term monitoring of brain activity and animal behaviours, and automated data storage and analysis for drug testing or other research. We anticipate that smart homecage platforms for high-throughput longitudinal monitoring of rodents behaviour and Brain Activity will be useful for a wide range of studies in basic and translational biological science, and in particular, it will be useful for studying behavioural phenotypes in genetic models of human disorders, and for relating behavioural abnormalities to their underlying genetic and neural causes.

我们的项目解决了目前涉及研究动物的基本活动中的空白：(1)啮齿动物模型仍然是与疾病相关的生物医学和药理学研究中最常见的，包括高传染性病原体和有毒物质。尽管如此，研究涉及与实验动物直接接触，并通过个人防护设备降低风险。这是昂贵的，并造成持续的健康风险；(2)为研究啮齿动物的健康状况、行为和行为任务的啮齿动物训练而收集的实验数据总是在专门和昂贵的仪器中进行，与它们的笼子分开，通常在另一个专门的房间里进行。这种方法是一个耗时和劳动密集型的过程，是收集和管理行为空间内密度和扩展的大量数据的主要制约因素。啮齿动物的处理会导致不可避免的压力，这在许多研究中都是一个困惑。此外，由于在动物训练和数据收集和分析过程中不可避免的人为错误，它降低了发现的可重复性。我们建议开发一种产品，这是一种数字笼子，一种用于动物行为数据收集和分析的自动化系统，用于使用人工智能在其笼子中进行行为表型分析。我们的系统基于低成本的摄像机和传感器组合，使我们的系统高度模块化和可扩展，可用于自动化和远程高通量数据收集和分析。我们的系统可以很容易地适应现有的动物设施基础设施，使畜牧业过程自动化，也可以对大脑活动和动物行为进行大规模的长期监测，并为药物测试或其他研究自动化数据存储和分析。我们预计，用于高通量啮齿动物行为和大脑活动纵向监测的智能家居平台将有助于基础和转化生物科学的广泛研究，特别是，它将有助于研究人类疾病遗传模型中的行为表型，并将行为异常与其潜在的遗传和神经原因联系起来。