Scoring social interactions between mice is both important for quantifying the social phenotype and at the same time most labor intensive. The qSIM combines several technologies for a novel, fully automatic method of scoring social interactions between two individual mice. (video introduction)
A thermal camera is used for video recording of the animals. The identity is established and continuously verified by reading out subcutaneous RFID tags. The processing software fuses this information, determines the animal positions as well as the orientation, and classifies the behavior type.
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The social behavior is classified into 25 categories. Multiple event types can occur simultaneously.
Repertoire of social interactions is based on de Chaumont et al., Nature Methods (2012).