Biology subjects

Nishimaru, H.

Publications and source records attributed to Nishimaru, H..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2023

Three-dimensional markerless motion capture of multiple freely behaving monkeys for automated characterization of social behavior

Given their high sociality and close evolutionary distance to humans, monkeys are an essential animal model for unraveling the biological mechanisms underlying human social behavior and elucidating the pathogenesis of diseases exhibiting abnormal social behavior. However, behavioral analysis of naturally behaving monkeys requires manual counting of various behaviors, which has been a bottleneck due to problems in throughput and objectivity. Here, we developed a three-dimensional markerless motion capture system that utilized multi-view data for robust tracking of individual monkeys and accurate reconstruction of the three-dimensional poses of multiple monkeys living in groups. Validation analysis in two monkey groups revealed that the system enabled the characterization of individual social dispositions and relationships through automated detection of various social events. Analyses of social looking facilitated the investigation of adaptive behaviors in a social group. These results suggest that this motion capture system will significantly enhance our ability to analyze primate social behavior.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2021

Acoustic camera system for measuring ultrasound communication in mice

To investigate molecular, genetic, and neural mechanisms underlying social behaviors and their deficits in neuropsychiatric disorders, social communication via ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) in mice has received considerable attention as a powerful experimental model. The advances in sound localization technology have facilitated the analysis of vocal interactions between multiple mice. However, existing sound localization systems are built around distributed-microphone arrays, which require a special recording arena and long processing time. Here we report a novel acoustic camera system, USVCAM, which enables simpler and faster USV localization and assignment. The system comprises recently developed USV segmentation algorithms with a modification for overlapping vocalizations that results in high accuracy. Using USVCAM, we analyzed USV communications in a conventional home cage, and demonstrated novel vocal interactions in female ICR mice under a resident-intruder paradigm. The extended applicability and usability of USVCAM may facilitate future studies investigating normal and abnormal vocal communication and social behaviors, as well as the underlying physiological mechanisms.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2020

Reward-associated configural cues elicit theta oscillations of rat retrosplenial neurons phase-locked to LFP theta cycle

Previous behavioral studies implicated the retrosplenial cortex (RSC) in stimulus-stimulus associations, and also in retrieval of remote associative memory based on EEG theta oscillations. To investigate the neural mechanisms underlying these processes, RSC neurons and local field potentials (LFPs) were simultaneously recorded from well-trained rats performing a cue-reward association task. In the task, simultaneous presentation of two multimodal conditioned stimuli (configural CSs) predicted a reward outcome opposite to that associated with individual presentation of each elemental CS. Here, we show neurophysiological evidence that the RSC is involved in stimulus-stimulus association where configural CSs are discriminated from each elementary CS that is a constituent of the configural CSs, and that memory retrieval of rewarding CSs is associated with theta oscillation of RSC neurons during CS presentation, which is phase-locked to LFP theta cycles.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2020

MacaquePose: A novel 'in the wild' macaque monkey pose dataset for markerless motion capture

Video-based markerless motion capture permits quantification of an animals pose and motion, with a high spatiotemporal resolution in a naturalistic context, and is a powerful tool for analyzing the relationship between the animals behaviors and its brain functions. Macaque monkeys are excellent non-human primate models, especially for studying neuroscience. Due to the lack of a dataset allowing training of a deep neural network for the macaques markerless motion capture in the naturalistic context, it has been challenging to apply this technology for macaques-based studies. In this study, we created MacaquePose, a novel open dataset with manually labeled body part positions for macaques in naturalistic scenes, consisting of >13,000 images, refined by researchers. We show that the pose estimation performance of an artificial neural network trained with the dataset is close to that of a human-level. The MacaquePose will provide a platform for innovative behavior analysis for non-human primate.

neuroscience↗