A Rodent Paw Tracker Using Support Vector Machine

Abstract

The observation of both human and animal kinematics has proven to be of tremendous scientific value for both understanding biological phenomena and development of medical treatments. Rodents, in particular, are widely used as a model for human disease. Unfortunately, they are also notoriously difficult to use in experiments requiring the use of motion capture (MoCap) for kinematic analyses. Current commercially available technology for rodent MoCap (e.g. Digigait [1, 2], Motorater, Noldus Catwalk [3, 4]) requires either frequent anaesthesia for shaving and tattooing of anatomical landmarks , or retroreflective markers known to agitate rodent subjects. Less automated methods require the use of high speed video capture and manual tracking, which both time and data intensive.