B-SOiD revolutionized the way scientists study behavior

Yttri said: "Behavior drives everything we do

As a behavioral neuroscientist, Yttri studies what happens in the brain when animals walk, eat, smell, or do any movement

Now, Yttri and his laboratory’s PhD candidate in Biological Sciences, Alex Hsu, have developed a new unsupervised machine learning algorithm that makes behavioral research easier and more accurate

Previously, the standard way to capture animal behavior was to track very simple movements, such as whether a trained mouse pressed a lever or whether the animal was eating

Hsu realized that he could use an unsupervised learning algorithm to do these time-consuming tasks

"It uses an equation to determine when the behavior begins

Yttri said that B-SOiD provides a huge improvement and opens up several avenues for new research

"It eliminates user prejudice, and more importantly, eliminates time cost and heavy work.

In addition, B-SOiD is very user-friendly and open to any researcher

The collaborators have even begun to use B-SOiD to study the human movement of Parkinson's disease patients

"We started to see if this can be used as part of a doctor's objective test to show how much the patient's disease has progressed

This is a breakthrough in how scientists study natural behavior and its changes, rather than the overly simplistic or subjective methods that dominate neuroscience and animal behavior

Journal Reference :

1. Alexander I.