Veterinary software

tracking

General Information The Water Maze Program is designed to automate the processing of animal studies using "Morris" type water mazes. Columbus Instruments' Videomex-V or Videomex-ONE products are employed as sensing elements in the construction of a complete tracking system measuring the subject's attempt to search out the goal platform in either circular or square mazes. Each trial is automatically terminated when the subject reaches the goal platform, prompting the operator for the next subject. User created zone maps may be used to subdivide the maze area into quadrants, annular rings or both. Collected data includes the number of entries into each zone, time spent in each zone and distance or "path length" in each zone. In addition to the data for each zone, the system calculates the total path length for the entire trial, the latency period before reaching the goal and the initial heading of the subject after a user-selected distance from the start has been exceeded. Data is also collected for each of the platform sites, one of which is selected as the goal platform on the zone map. The three inactive platform sites may be used to indicate locations of active platforms used in the previous trials allowing the user to investigate each subject's inclination to home in on these previous sites before seeking out the new site. Each experiment is organized as a set of up to 100 trials with each trial including its own eight character, user selected, subject identification label.