TailSuspScan is a component of our DepressionScan Suite. The Tail suspension test is a widely used to assess depressive-like behavior in rodents. The test induces short-term inescapable stress by suspending test subjects by the tail. Observation is made with regard to animal’s struggling and immobility actions. Human observation is tedious, time consuming, and expensive.
TailSuspScan automates the entire observation process of tail suspension experiment. It automatically detects not only the time the animal spends in an immobile state, but also the time animal is struggling. In addition, TailSuspScan has the capability to differentiate between active struggling mobility and passive swinging mobility. The latter can either be grouped into the Immobility category or grouped with the Mobility class, thus making the results of Immobility much more precise according to the user’s protocol. Only the motion caused by active struggling behavior is captured as Mobility. Various settings are available that allow the user to adjust the definition of what is Immobility, Passive Mobility, and Active Mobility. We also manufacture the tail suspension apparatus for sale. Please contact us if you are interested in this apparatus also.
The tail suspension test is a highly variable test from lab to lab and accordingly, TailSuspScan has been designed to be very flexible. TailSuspScan allows the user to precisely set his/her definition of Mobility/Struggle and Immobility behaviors. The cornerstone of TailSuspScan is its unique ability to compensate for the passive swinging motion that arises after the animal has stopped struggling and switches to a passive state. Due the previous struggle activity, there is so much inertia built into the swinging motion that just because the animal gives up trying to struggle the animal is still moving quite actively. The correct categorization for most users for this type of passive swinging is Immobility. TailSuspScan allows the user to turn on the Motion Compensation Mode that considers whole body swinging as Immobility instead of Mobility. Mobility is detected only when the animal is contorting itself or moving very actively.
TailSuspScan software detects 3 separate classes of activity for this test. Our three classes of activity include Mobility (or Struggle), Immobility, and Other. Mobility class is the highly active class where the animal is moving actively or contorting its body. Immobility is the class where the animal or certain body parts show little or no movement, including Passive Swinging. Finally, the Other class is the “in‐ between” class where the animal is neither in Mobility state nor in Immobility state.
The image to the right depicts a display of the results section that shows the durations of each of those 3 categories for 2 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.
TailSuspScan 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.