The animal restraints section focuses on head fixation and animal restraint to facilitate electrode insertion while ensuring minimal discomfort for the subject. Considerations are made to provide a comfortable experience during experiments.
Prioritizing minimal discomfort and adapting to biological and surgical deviations is pivotal. This approach ensures the animal's comfort throughout the experiments, contributing to standardized and reliable video data acquisition. By minimizing stress or discomfort, the animal is better poised to participate comfortably in experimental tasks while supporting consistent data collection.
The design and setup of the animal restraint compartment considers the well-being of the subject, aligning with ethical considerations and the need for standardized data acquisition protocols. Two main points are to be optimized:
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Headfixation: Enabling stable head positioning for precise electrode insertion and minimizing movement during experiments.
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Comfort and Flexibility: Positioning of the mouse holder is designed to accommodate variations between animals, ensuring adaptability for different biological and surgical conditions. This flexibility is crucial for maintaining the animal's comfort and enabling consistent experimental procedures.
Anna Nasr, is working on a deep-learning based system for analyzind animal discomfort using the grimace scale (to be published).
To build the animal restraint, You will need to have build the base setup. Other than that, you will need the following tools:
- Plastic tube
- Headbar holder
- Rod connector
- 5cm rod
- 6mm hex screw (x4)
- 3mm nut
Some components such as the rod connector and a headbar holder are available as 3D printable files in the [SimpleScienceSetup]((https://github.com/mik-schutte/SimpleScienceSetup). Additionally, the exact tools used here, as well as, alternatives can be found in this folder's bill of materials.
