A Novel Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Rodent Gait Reveals the Compensation Strategies Used during Spontaneous Recovery from Spinal Cord and Traumatic Brain Injury

Abstract

As rodent locomotion becomes a more popular behavioral assay, proper rodent gait analysis becomes more and more important. Gait measures, such as stride length, cycle time, and duty factor, are not independent of one another, making statistical comparisons between groups a tricky endeavor. Instead of identifying the mathematical relationships between a group of locomotor measures, we simply tracked the steps of rodents in x,y,t space. By plotting with respect to the reference limb, we are able to quantify locomotor changes in space, time, and coordination simultaneously. With our technique, we show that the overall locomotion of 77 rats 1 week after a C4/5 right overhemisection injury was significantly different than pre-injury. This difference was maintained in untreated animals for the entire 7 weeks of the study, but how this difference arose changed. Initially, the right forelimb exhibited very abnormal stepping, but eventually reduced its difference from preinjury levels. Conversely, the left forelimb was initially mildly different from pre-injury, but further deviated from normal stepping as the weeks went on. Our new gait analysis technique helps to show the trade-off between the restoration of function and the spontaneous development of compensatory techniques. When we applied this new analysis technique to 13 mice after a severe controlled cortical impact, we found that their locomotion was no different from 12 sham mice for the entire 4 weeks of the study. We believe that this gait analysis method succinctly addresses the confound of interdependency of gait measures and does so across multiple injury models.

CatWalk XT gait parameters: a review of reported parameters in pre-clinical studies of multiple central nervous system and peripheral nervous system disease models

“…The keywords used in the search process were CatWalk, rodents, mouse, mice, and the diseases of interest for our study. The majority of the studies (86%) were published between 2017 and 2022 ( Baiguera et al, 2012 ; Bernardes et al, 2017 ; Caballero-Garrido et al, 2017 ; Carboni et al, 2017 ; Chen et al, 2017 , 2019 , 2020 ; Cline et al, 2017 ; Fujimaki et al, 2017 ; Hayashi et al, 2017 ; Hsieh et al, 2017 ; Matyas et al, 2017 ; Mountney et al, 2017 ; Ni et al, 2017 ; Pöttker et al, 2017 ; Rocca et al, 2017 ; Roth et al, 2017 ; Schönfeld et al, 2017 ; Crowley et al, 2018 , 2019 ; Du et al, 2018a , b ; Frahm et al, 2018 ; Fröhlich et al, 2018 ; Liu et al, 2018 , 2019 ; Lu et al, 2018 ; Mozafari et al, 2018 ; Noristani et al, 2018 ; Okuwa et al, 2018 ; Sowa et al, 2018 ; Su et al, 2018 ; Timotius et al, 2018b , 2021 ; Truong et al, 2018 ; Zhu et al, 2018 ; Cross et al, 2019 ; Guy et al, 2019 ; Kolosowska et al, 2019 ; Leite et al, 2019 ; Ma et al, 2019 ; Minakaki et al, 2019 ; Minarelli et al, 2019 ; Miterko et al, 2019 ; Pacheco et al, 2019 ; Thau-Zuchman et al, 2019 ; Bengoa-Vergniory et al, 2020 ; Campos-Pires et al, 2020 ; Chung et al, 2020 ; Goldshmit et al, 2020 ; Goncalves et al, 2020 ; Heinzel et al, 2020a ; Henry et al, 2020 ; Lin et al, 2020 , 2022 ; Murphy et al, 2020 ; Namdar et al, 2020 ; ...…”

The Effect of Traumatic Brain Injury on Sleep Architecture and Circadian Rhythms in Mice—A Comparison of High-Frequency Head Impact and Controlled Cortical Injury

“…Sham injury consisted of anesthesia and the midline incision, with no craniotomy or impact. Wound clips were removed 10–14 days post-surgery [ 40 , 42 ].…”

Implantation of regenerative complexes in traumatic brain injury canine models enhances the reconstruction of neural networks and motor function recovery

“…Because of the tremendous differences in brain structure, these TBI model rodents exhibit relatively low physiological and pathological similarities with clinical features of human TBI 16 . In addition, the evaluation methods for effective TBI repair in many studies are singular and unobjective 17 . From both anatomical and functional perspectives, a limited number of studies have objectively revealed locomotory improvements of hemiplegic limbs after TBI repair 16 .…”