Standardizing the analysis of conditioned fear in rodents: a multidimensional software approach

Data comparability between different laboratories strongly depends on the individually applied analysis method. This factor is often a critical source of variation in rodent phenotyping and has never been systematically investigated in Pavlovian fear conditioning paradigms. In rodents, fear is typically quantified in terms of freezing duration via manual observation or automated systems. While manual analysis includes biases such as tiredness or inter-personal scoring variability, computer-assisted systems are unable to distinguish between freezing and immobility. Consequently, the novel software called MOVE follows a semi-automatized approach that prefilters video sequences of interest for…