ForcedSwimScan is a component of our DepressionScan Suite. The forced swim test, as originally described by Porsolt et al, is the most widely used pharmacological method assessing antidepressant activity. This is largely due to its ease to use, reliability across laboratories, and ability to detect a broad spectrum of antidepressants. ForcedSwimScan, not only provides more accurate results, but is also able to support the “Extended Forced Swim Test”, measuring the time spent struggling/escaping/climbing/diving versus time spent floating/immobile/passive swimming in a tall cylinder filled with water.
Though easy to use, the observation by humans has been a burden for research scientists. Human observers, relying on a stopwatch, are heavily burdened if they are taking notes while watching out for behaviors. Corroboration among multiple observers is needed to ensure reliable results, thus it becomes an expensive process. The process is time consuming, prohibiting high throughput screening.
ForcedSwimScan is designed to relieve all those problems and automate the entire observation process of the forced swim test. It takes video of the experiment, analyzes the video, and automatically calculates the time spent struggling/escaping/climbing and time spent floating/immobile/passively swimming. All these individual behavior sub‐categories can be measured and output separately. Hence, the user has the flexibility to either analyze these sub‐category data or analyze combined entire category data.
The forced swim test is a highly variable test from lab to lab and accordingly, ForcedSwimScan has been designed to be very flexible. The software detects the body parts of the animal and allows the user to set whether to use body part motion or full body motion for analysis. ForcedSwimScan allows the user to precisely set his/her definition of struggle/escape/climb/dive and float/immobility/swim behaviors. The cornerstone of ForcedSwimScan is its unique ability to identify animal body parts and their motion to achieve precise analysis, not just relying on simple overall motion detection.
ForcedSwimScan software detects 6 separate classes of activity for this test. Our six classes of activity include Escape (or Struggle), Climb, Immobility (or Float) Full Dive, Passive Dive, and Swim. The Swim class is essentially comprised of the gentle swim periods in the experiment. Escape class is the highly active class where the animal is swimming fast with limbs thrashing the water. Climb is the vertical activity of the animal. Full Dive and Passive Dive are the two classes of dive behavior with the former being the full dive where the animal trying to escape by diving under and the latter is the type of dive where the animal simply becomes submerged briefly while being immobile. Immobility is the class where the animal or certain body parts show little or no movement. Finally, Swim class is the “in‐ between” class where the animal is neither escaping nor immobile. The following results section shows the durations in each of those 6 categories for 4 animals analyzed simultaneously. Up to 4 animals can be analyzed simultaneously with the High‐Throughput Option. Realtime Option provides the ability to perform analysis in realtime while the video is compressed and saved to the hard‐drive of the computer.
Clever Sys offers a cabinet for holding the water tanks for ForcedSwimScan. Cabinets can be purchased as units of 2, and the cabinet comes with a opening on the floor where the tank is placed to allow for easy drainage.
ForcedSwimScan comes with a complete Experiment Data Management framework that allows users to maintain and group export results from multiple trials in an experiment. Group Export can summarize result data from all animals into a single Excel sheet for convenience. No more cutting and pasting! Other salient features include the ability to start and stop analysis at preset time/duration as well the ability to perform offline batch analysis where multiple videos can be successively analyzed by ForcedSwimScan without user intervention.
