An automated whisker tracking tool for the rat facial nerve injury paradigm

Dorschner, Benjamin; Süße, Herbert; Ortmann, Wolfgang; Irintchev, Andrey; Denzler, Joachim; Guntinas‐Lichius, Orlando

doi:10.1016/j.jneumeth.2016.07.015

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Another area which we strove to improve upon was the collection and evaluation of the appropriate quantitative data to determine the efficacy of IGF-1 on the test animals. Several methods have been reported to evaluate facial movements, such as eyelid closure and/or whisker motor performance which are, by their nature, difficult to elicit and measure in laboratory animals [ 7 , 42 , 43 ]. Furthermore, quantitative measurement has been a challenge because these methods often depended on the naked eye or video recording methods that were not described in detail and may have been measured by hand.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of insulin-like growth factor 1 on the recovery of facial nerve function in a guinea pig model of facial palsy

et al. 2020

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The efficacy of insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) in the treatment of peripheral facial nerve palsy was investigated using an animal model. The facial nerve within the temporal bone was exposed and compressed by clamping. The animals were treated with either IGF-1 or saline which was topically administered by a gelatin-based sustained-release hydrogel via an intratemporal route. The recovery from facial nerve palsy was evaluated at 8 weeks postoperatively based on eyelid closure, complete recovery rate, electroneurography and number of axons found on the facial nerve. IGF-1 treatment resulted in significant improvement in the changes of the degree of eyelid closure over the total time period and complete recovery rate. A separate study showed that IGF-1 receptor mRNA was expressed in facial nerves up to 14 days after the nerve-clamping procedure. IGF-1 was thus found to be effective in the treatment of peripheral facial nerve palsy when topically applied using a sustained-release gelatin-based hydrogel via an intratemporal route.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of insulin-like growth factor 1 on the recovery of facial nerve function in a guinea pig model of facial palsy

et al. 2020

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“…In the past, several approaches have been taken to address this problem. Many of these involve the clipping of all but one or a few whiskers (Bermejo et al, 2002;Knutsen et al, 2005Knutsen et al, , 2008Voigts et al, 2008;O'Connor et al, 2010a;Clack et al, 2012;Dorschner et al, 2016;Nashaat et al, 2017;Sehara et al, 2019;Petersen et al, 2020). Although animals are astonishingly good at obtaining sensory input from a single spared whisker (O'Connor et al, 2010a), whisker clipping is a rather unsatisfactory method from a behavioral point of view (Pluta et al, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

WhiskEras: A New Algorithm for Accurate Whisker Tracking

Betting

Romano

Al-Ars

et al. 2020

Front. Cell. Neurosci.

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Rodents engage in active touch using their facial whiskers: they explore their environment by making rapid back-and-forth movements. The fast nature of whisker movements, during which whiskers often cross each other, makes it notoriously difficult to track individual whiskers of the intact whisker field. We present here a novel algorithm, WhiskEras, for tracking of whisker movements in high-speed videos of untrimmed mice, without requiring labeled data. WhiskEras consists of a pipeline of image-processing steps: first, the points that form the whisker centerlines are detected with sub-pixel accuracy. Then, these points are clustered in order to distinguish individual whiskers. Subsequently, the whiskers are parameterized so that a single whisker can be described by four parameters. The last step consists of tracking individual whiskers over time. We describe that WhiskEras performs better than other whisker-tracking algorithms on several metrics. On our four video segments, WhiskEras detected more whiskers per frame than the Biotact Whisker Tracking Tool. The signal-to-noise ratio of the output of WhiskEras was higher than that of Janelia Whisk. As a result, the correlation between reflexive whisker movements and cerebellar Purkinje cell activity appeared to be stronger than previously found using other tracking algorithms. We conclude that WhiskEras facilitates the study of sensorimotor integration by markedly improving the accuracy of whisker tracking in untrimmed mice.

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“…Analysis of vibrissae motor performance . Motor function can be assessed in detail by video‐based analysis of vibrissal whisking (Dorschner et al, ; Guntinas‐Lichius et al, ; Tomov et al, ). At a frequency of about 6 Hz, “normal intact animals” explore their local environment by coordinated sweeps of their individual vibrissae (Bermejo et al, ; Carvell and Simons, ; Hadlock et al, , ; Komisaruk, ; Semba et al, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental Studies on Facial Nerve Regeneration

Rink

Bendella²,

Akkın

et al. 2019

The Anatomical Record

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Insufficient recovery after injury of a peripheral motor nerve is due to (1) inappropriate pathfinding as a result of axonal regrowth to inappropriate targets, (2) excessive collateral axonal branching at the lesion site, and (3) polyinnervation of the neuromuscular junctions (NMJs). The rat facial nerve model is often used because of its simple and reliable readout to measure recovery of function (vibrissal whisking). Over the last decades scientists have concentrated their efforts to combat mostly NMJ polyinnervation, because it turned out to be very difficult to reduce collateral axonal branching and impossible to navigate thousands of axons toward the original fascicles. In the past, several groups of scientists concentrated their efforts to reduce the activity-dependent polyinnervation of NMJs by electrical stimulation of the muscles (square 0.1 msec pulses at 5 Hz). The results showed no recovery of functions and a severe reduction in the number of innervated NMJs to approximately one fifth of those observed in intact animals. More recent experiments, however, have shown that motor recovery improved significantly following mechanical stimulation of the denervated facial muscles (vibrissal and orbicularis oculi) and that restored functions could invariably be linked to reduced polyinnervation at the NMJ while the number of innervated NMJ remained the same. These results suggest that clinically feasible and effective therapies could be developed and tested in the near future.

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An automated whisker tracking tool for the rat facial nerve injury paradigm

Cited by 7 publications

References 28 publications

The effect of insulin-like growth factor 1 on the recovery of facial nerve function in a guinea pig model of facial palsy

The effect of insulin-like growth factor 1 on the recovery of facial nerve function in a guinea pig model of facial palsy

WhiskEras: A New Algorithm for Accurate Whisker Tracking

Experimental Studies on Facial Nerve Regeneration

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