Automated electrical stimulation and physical activity monitoring of zebrafish larvae

Zebrafish (Danio rerio) is accepted as an efficient model to aid in research over a broad range of human diseases and drug discovery. However, obtaining evidences of pain perception similarity between adults and larvae is still a considerable scientific challenge. This paper presents an automated test-bed for electrical stimulation and physical activity monitoring of zebrafish larvae. It comprises of infrared digital camera and 25 test arenas along with the required software and hardware circuitry. Unlike existing systems, the developed system is fully automatic and does not require any manual adjustments. In addition, it is capable of estimating and monitoring physical activity of multiple larvae at various levels of painful stimulation. Performance of the developed testbed is assessed experimentally using various stimulation levels for numerous test batches of zebrafish larvae. The obtained results demonstrated accurate tracking and monitoring of multiple larvae responses for various levels of painful stimulation.