| February
10, 2004
California Scientists Unveil Pilot Project At UC San
Diego For Automated Monitoring Of Animal Behavior In Medical
Research
‘Smart Vivarium’ Could Enable Better
Care Of Laboratory Animals
By Doug Ramsey
Computer scientists
and animal care experts at the University of California, San
Diego (UCSD) have come up with a new way to automate the monitoring
of mice and other animals in laboratory research. Combining
cameras and distributed, non-invasive sensors with elements
of computer vision, information technology and artificial intelligence,
the Smart Vivarium project aims to enhance the quality of animal
research, while at the same time enabling better health care
for animals.
 |
Jacobs School's Serge
Belongie
demonstrates Smart Vivarium technology |
The pilot project is
led by Serge Belongie, an assistant professor in Computer Science
and Engineering at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering.
It is funded entirely by the California Institute for Telecommunications
and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)²], a joint venture
of UCSD and UC Irvine. “Today a lot of medical research
relies on drug administration and careful monitoring of large
numbers of live mice and other animals, usually in cages located
in a vivarium,” said Belongie. “But it is an entirely
manual process, so there are limitations on how often observations
can be made, and how thoroughly those observations can be analyzed.”
Belongie put together
an interdisciplinary team to develop the hardware and software
for automated, 24-hour-a-day monitoring and archiving of a continuous
stream of measurements on animal behavior – rather than
periodic observations by a lab technician. So far, Belongie
has demonstrated the computer-vision and pattern-recognition
software with data from a single cage, but the deployment inside
a full-scale vivarium is still in the proposal stages. Noted
Belongie: “We are now hoping to embark on a multi-million-dollar
project that would allow us to develop and deploy the technology
for two key areas – medical research, and emergency response.”
UCSD is a major biological
sciences research center, and animal-care specialists believe
the technology under development could dramatically improve
the care of research animals. “The Smart Vivarium will
make better use of fewer lab animals and lead to more efficient
animal health care,” said Phil Richter, Director of UCSD’s
Animal Care Program, who is working with Belongie on the project.
“Sick animals would be detected and diagnosed sooner,
allowing for earlier treatments.” The technology would
also help to reduce the number of animals needed in scientific
investigations. “In medical research, experiments are
sometimes repeated due to observational and analytical limitations,”
said Belongie. “By recording all the data the first time,
scientists could go back and look for different patterns in
the data without using more mice to perform the new experiment.”
For many of the same
reasons, the underlying technology could be useful for the early
diagnosis and monitoring of sick animals in zoos, veterinary
offices and agriculture. (“Early detection of lameness
in livestock,” noted Belongie, “could help stop
the transmission of disease.”) The computer scientist
also intends to seek collaboration with the San Diego Zoo and
other local institutions for practical field deployment of the
monitoring systems as part of an upcoming study.
A possible ancillary
use for this technology could be for emergency response, specifically,
for monitoring so-called ‘sentinel’ cages. “This
is the modern-day version of the canary in a coal mine,”
said Belongie. “Animals can be very sensitive to chemical
or biological agents, and sentinel cages have already been deployed
at potential bio-terrorism targets and chemical research facilities
to warn operators of gas or other leaks. Instead of requiring
that a human watch each animal in each cage for early warning
signs, the Smart Vivarium technology would automate the process,
resulting in reduced need for such sentinels.”
 As
for improvements in medical research from the continuous monitoring
of lab animals, Belongie expects at least an improvement of
two orders of magnitude in the automated collection and processing
of monitoring data. “Continuous monitoring and mining
of animal physiological and behavioral data will allow medical
researchers to detect subtle patterns expressible only over
lengthy longitudinal studies,” noted Belongie. “By
providing a never-before-available, vivarium-wide collection
of continuous animal behavior measurements, this technology
could yield major breakthroughs in drug design and medical research,
not to mention veterinary science, experimental psychology and
animal care.”
Apart from Belongie
and officials from the UCSD Animal Care Program, two Jacobs
School of Engineering faculty members are collaborating on the
project: Bioengineering professor Geert W. Schmid-Schonbein,
a leader in microcirculation research, who is providing input
on how to maximize the utility of the design of the Smart Vivarium;
and Computer Science and Engineering professor Rajesh Gupta,
who is leading the effort to create a distributed, embedded
platform that will integrate all of the functions in a tiny
silicon-based package that could be mounted on existing lab
cages without requiring a wholesale redesign of cages used by
vivarium operators. “This project typifies the interdisciplinary
nature of our research,” said Ramesh Rao, UCSD Division
Director of Cal-(IT)². “Professor Belongie and his
colleagues are working to produce a practical system that will
require overcoming huge research challenges in areas as diverse
as computer vision, bioengineering, embedded systems design,
and animal care protocols. And based on the pilot project so
far, they are off to a good start.”
Note to Editors:
Photos of Professor Belongie and a computer vision-enabled cage
can be downloaded from the Faculty & Students and Research
sections of the Image Gallery at http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news_events/gallery/.
About Cal-(IT)²
The California Institute
for Telecommunications and Information Technology is one of
four institutes created by the State in late 2000 to ensure
that California maintain its leadership in cutting-edge technologies.
Cal-(IT)²’s mission: to extend the reach of the current
information infrastructure throughout the physical world –
enabling anywhere/anytime access to the Internet. More than
220 professors and senior researchers from UC Irvine and UC
San Diego are collaborating on interdisciplinary projects. www.calit2.net.
Media contact: Doug Ramsey
(858) 822-5825 dramsey@ucsd.edu
|
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