High-speed video analysis of laboratory rats behaviors in forced swim test

The forced swim test (FST) is a method for measuring the pharmacological effects of antidepressants or changes in stress-evoked behavior in laboratory animals such as rats and mice. However, traditional manual or automatic measurement methods using video recorded at 30 fps (frames per second) have not always been accurate and objective because laboratory animals frequently make quick movements during the FST. In the present paper, a novel laboratory animal behavior quantification system is developed for the FST by introducing a high-speed vision system that can record images at a frame rate of 240 fps for a long time. The developed system can accurately discriminate immobility, climbing, and swimming behaviors of laboratory rats in the FST. We evaluate the effectiveness of the developed system by obtaining experimental results for a nine-minute FST using several laboratory rats.