MouBeAT: A New and Open Toolbox for Guided Analysis of Behavioral Tests in Mice

Animal behavioral tests are essential to understand the bases of neurologic and psychological disorders, which can be evaluated by different methodological and experimental models. However, the quantification of behavioral tests results is limited by the considerable amount of time needed for manual evaluation and the high costs of automated analysis software. To overcome these limitations, we describe here a new, open source toolbox for ImageJ, called Mouse Behavioral Analysis Toolbox (MouBeAT), designed to analyze different behavioral tests in rodents semi-automatically. These tests include Open Field (OF), Elevated Plus Maze (EPM), Y-maze (YM) test and Morris Water Maze (MWM). MouBeAT showed a high correlation with manual evaluation in all the parameters analyzed for all the behavioral tests, reinforcing its value as an accurate analysis tool. This new tool is freely available online.This study was funded by a grant from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades to EL-P (SAF2015-65722-R), and grants from the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (RIC, RD12/0042/0057) and the Autonomous Region of Madrid (BRADE S2013/ICE-2958) to MD, as well as by Centro de Investigacion Biomedica en Red de Salud Mental (CIBERSAM). This work was also supported by the Plan Estatal de I+D+I 2013-2016-European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) ``A way of making Europe,'' Spain. The Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC) is supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades and by the Pro-CNIC Foundation and is a Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence (MINECO award SEV-2015-0505).S