Automated Tracking of Ocular Movements of Fish Using a Semi-supervised Algorithm: A Laboratory Study on Optokinetic Response of Adult Zebrafish
摘要
Optokinetic Response or OKR is a reflexive visuomotor response of vertebrates to a surrounding visual stimulus in motion. The eye movements during OKR can be divided into two phases – the slow SPEM (smooth pursuit eye movement) phase, along the same direction of the moving stimulus and the fast nystagmus phase (corrective saccadic movements), in the opposite direction. OKR is considered to be a crucial indicator of several fundamental and pathological aspects of visual functioning. Zebrafish, a freshwater fish, is an emerging animal model for vision research. However, in the context of national scenario, there remains a dearth of quantitative OKR studies in zebrafish. Moreover, globally, only a few commercially available instruments for recording OKR in zebrafish are available. Thus, OKR recording and computerized tracking of the ocular movement in response to the visual stimulus from videographic data remains a challenging area of research. The present study thus, aimed at automated tracking of the ocular movements of zebrafish, using a semi-supervised computerized tracking algorithm, in response to the visual stimulus, through development of a customized and cost-effective OKR apparatus, in the laboratory. The eye movement was quantified in terms of the frequency of the ocular movement of the fish, as computed from the nystagmus frequency. The results obtained from the proposed algorithm was standardized using the manually computed values (the actual count method) and was also compared with that of the classical methods of Optical Flow and FlowNet. The proposed technique outperformed the classical methods by offering the best balance between accuracy and stability.