MouseVUER: video based open-source system for laboratory mouse home-cage monitoring.

Video monitoring of mice in the home-cage reveals behavior profiles without the disruptions caused by specialized test setups and makes it possible to quantify changes in behavior patterns continually over long time frames. Several commercial home-cage monitoring systems are available with varying costs and capabilities; however there are currently no open-source systems for home-cage monitoring. We present an open-source system for top-down video monitoring of research mice in a slightly modified home-cage. The system is designed for integration with Allentown NexGen ventilated racks and allows unobstructed view of up to three mice, but can also be operated outside the rack. The system has an easy to duplicate and assemble home-cage design along with a video acquisition solution. The system utilizes a depth video camera, and we demonstrate the robustness of depth video for home-cage mice monitoring. For researchers without access to Allentown NexGen ventilated racks, we provide designs and assembly instructions for a standalone non-ventilated rack solution that holds three systems for more compact and efficient housing. We make all the design files, along with detailed assembly and installation instructions, available on the project webpage ( https://github.com/NIH-CIT-OIR-SPIS/MouseVUER ).

Digital video recorder for Raspberry PI cameras with multi-camera synchronous acquisition.

Video acquisition and analysis have become integral parts of scientific research. Two major components of a video acquisition system are the choice of camera and the acquisition software. A vast variety of cameras are available on the market. Turnkey multi-camera synchronous acquisition software, however, is not as widely available. For prototyping applications, the Raspberry Pi (RPi) has been widely utilized due to many factors, including cost. There are implementations for video acquisition and preview from a single RPi camera, including one implementation released by the RPi organization itself. However, there are no multi-camera acquisition solutions for the RPi. This paper presents an open-source digital video recorder (DVR) system for the popular RPi camera. The DVR is simple to setup and use for acquisition with a single camera or multiple cameras. In the case of multiple cameras, the acquisition is synchronized between cameras. The DVR comes with a graphical user interface (GUI) to allow previewing the camera streams, setting recording parameters, and associating "names" to cameras. The acquisition code as well as the DVR GUI are written in Python. The open-source software also includes a GUI for playback of recorded video. The versatility of the DVR is demonstrated with a life science research application involving high-throughput monitoring of fruit-flies.