NeuroGOAL Members Present at Neuroscience Post-Baccalaureate Poster Day
Nicola Grissom’s research group NeuroGOAL including A Yang, Solomon Aviles, and Erin Giglio presented at the Neuroscience Post-Baccalaureate Poster Day (hosted by the MINDS program) on June 11th.
The poster “MouseTV: Networked and automated animal behavioral videos via UMN Infrastructure” delved into the “interest in obtaining video recordings as [mouse] subjects perform their behavioral task." Such recordings often entail setups high in cost, data storage options that are not automatable, and storage facilities that labs must establish and maintain themselves.”
This project outlines a project aimed at reducing the costs and complexity of recording animal behavior. The "MouseTV" system uses affordable Raspberry Pis with custom 3D-printed cases and infrared cameras to record mice in operant tasks. These recordings are stored on a secure university subnet which ensures network security and access to university storage resources. This setup allows for large-scale, automated video acquisition and storage, providing a flexible solution for high-throughput behavioral research - for a fraction of the cost of other such systems.
“Altogether, we were able to obtain a large amount of videos and automatically offload them to data servers maintained and backed up by the University. With this, MouseTV provides the groundwork for mass high-throughput behavioral video acquisition that is entirely automatable and networked while still being flexible enough to be tailored to other projects.”
A Yang, technician in the NeuroGOAL Lab in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota.
Composed by Madison Stromberg, communications assistant.
