A three-dimensional virtual mouse generates synthetic training data for behavioral analysis.

Bolaños, Luis A; Xiao, Dongsheng; Ford, Nancy L; LeDue, Jeff M; Gupta, Pankaj K; Doebeli, Carlos; Hu, Hao; Rhodin, Helge et al. · Nat Methods · 2021

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

We developed a three-dimensional (3D) synthetic animated mouse based on computed tomography scans that is actuated using animation and semirandom, joint-constrained movements to generate synthetic behavioral data with ground-truth label locations. Image-domain translation produced realistic synthetic videos used to train two-dimensional (2D) and 3D pose estimation models with accuracy similar to typical manual training datasets. The outputs from the 3D model-based pose estimation yielded better definition of behavioral clusters than 2D videos and may facilitate automated ethological classification.

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