High-throughput animal tracking in chemobehavioral phenotyping: Current limitations and future perspectives

Behavioral phenotyping is an essential part of neuro-active drug discovery and predictive neurotoxicology. Due to limitations of conventional rodent in vivo models, chemobehavioral phenotypic analysis utilizing innovative small model organisms; such as nematodes, planarians and zebrafish are emerging as distinctively advantageous for high-throughput phenotypic discovery of neuroceuticals and evaluating deleterious effects of industrial pollutants on the central nervous system. Digital film recording with subsequent analysis of video sequences using specialised animal tracking software has become a standard in obtaining behavioral biometric data. At present animal tracking algorithms are largely capable of detecting and tracking small number of animals and extracting quantitative endpoints associated with specific behavioral traits based on reconstruction of movement trajectories and occupancy heatmaps. However, despite recent and significant progress in development of diverse proxy biological models, the software algorithms still lack the ability to track multiple organisms on a large scale, automatically generate behavioral fingerprints and utilize intensive computational approaches to mine rich biometric data. This creates a significant bottleneck for effective high-throughput chemobehavioral screening in drug discovery and neurotoxicology. This review outlines recent advances as well as limitations of high-throughput animal tracking and provides an outlook on future developments in rapidly evolving field of neurobehavioral phenomics.