AUTHOR=Bello-Arroyo Elísabet , Roque Hélio , Marcos Alberto , Orihuel Javier , Higuera-Matas Alejandro , Desco Manuel , Caiolfa Valeria R. , Ambrosio Emilio , Lara-Pezzi Enrique , Gómez-Gaviro María Victoria TITLE=MouBeAT: A New and Open Toolbox for Guided Analysis of Behavioral Tests in Mice JOURNAL=Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience VOLUME=12 YEAR=2018 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/behavioral-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00201 DOI=10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00201 ISSN=1662-5153 ABSTRACT=

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.