An experimental setup for measuring distance and duration of rat behavior

Experiments of rat behavioral analysis have been playing important part in psychology, brain science and medical science. Open-field test is a popular experiment to study rat behavior. Elevated plus maze and holeboard model are usually used for open-field test. Their behavioral parameters such as moving distance, duration and actions in regions of interest are usually considered. These parameters are observed and recorded by human, certainly, it involves some human error. Commercial recording and analyzing programs are available but they are expensive. In this paper, we proposed a simple method for measuring parameters of rat's behaviors in the elevated plus maze and holeboard model test by using webcam and simple computer program. The camera is installed over the models. Parameters measured are distance and duration of rat's movement in the interested area. The proposed method consists of two main processes. Firstly, background modeling; K-mean clustering technique is adapted to reconstruct the background. Secondly, rat is extracted by means of background subtraction. Position and duration are measured in the selected area. To test performance of the proposed method, precision of the proposed method on elevated plus maze and holeboard models is considered. It is about 0.98 and 0.69 centimeters of error for elevated plus maze and holeboard models, respectively. The results show the feasibility of the proposed method. Advantage of the proposed method over other is that our method is simple self-setup for experimenter.