Department of Gerontopharmacology, Troponwerke GmbH & Co. KG, Köln, Germany
We validated the EthoVision tracking system for the assessment of the swimming behaviour of rats in the Morris spatial discrimination task six weeks after induction of subdural haematomas. This was achieved by scoring the behaviour with the EthoVision tracking system and with the conventional manual scoring method. Manual scoring was performed by a pretrained experimenter. The haematoma did not affect the navigation performance. The data obtained with the two scoring methods were almost identical, suggesting that the EthoVision system can be regarded as a good observational system. There was a discrepancy with respect to the measures that represented the swimming speed which could be due to differences between the two methods in the calculation of the speed: number of line crossings / escape latency (manual scoring) and traveled distance in cm / escape latency (EthoVision system), respectively. Another explanation for the differences in outcome might be that the spatial resolution of the automatic scoring system is higher than that of the manual scoring method.
The present study indicates that the EthoVision system can be considered a valid and reliable tool for the evaluation of swimming behaviour of rodents in the Morris task. Moreover, a more detailed analysis of the swimming behaviour can be obtained with the EthoVision system than with the manual scoring method.