A functional balance evaluation system for limb paresthesia mouse — Comparison between rotor rod and oscillating disk stage

The production and rearing of knockout mice, which are house mice with targeted congenital deficiency, contributes greatly for the advances of health science and genetic technology. The mouse with deficiency in the gene possesses the characteristic such as compromised immune system. Meanwhile, partial of the genes of the knockout mouse are intentionally compromised, yet the level of physical fitness or disability are not uniform and quite variable. Therefore, when anticipating them in the experiment on sensory and motor performance, the biography and medical record of the knockout mice are required along with their physical fitness and level of disability. The problem of the individual record is that the current physical fitness and level of disability assessment's accuracy and precision are low. This is due to the lack of instrumentation device and analysis system for testing the balance control ability of mouse. The conventional test with rotor rod device can be used for slight to mild disability mouse, but not appropriate for assessing severe limb paresthesia mouse. This research targets to develop a system to measure the behavior and posture controllability of laboratory mouse. In the experiment, normal mice's balance ability and knockout mice with cerebellum genetically modified are evaluated. Quality Engineering Mahalanobis-Taguchi System is applied for numerical analysis and quantitative evaluation of each mice group's characteristic feature and compared between the experiment devices to discuss the detection resolution. The Posture Control Evaluation System with the oscillating disk stage had preferable properties compared to rotor rod test.