- Yu, Huasheng;
- Xiong, Jingwei;
- Ye, Adam Yongxin;
- Cranfill, Suna Li;
- Cannonier, Tariq;
- Gautam, Mayank;
- Zhang, Marina;
- Bilal, Rayan;
- Park, Jong-Eun;
- Xue, Yuji;
- Polam, Vidhur;
- Vujovic, Zora;
- Dai, Daniel;
- Ong, William;
- Ip, Jasper;
- Hsieh, Amanda;
- Mimouni, Nour;
- Lozada, Alejandra;
- Sosale, Medhini;
- Ahn, Alex;
- Ma, Minghong;
- Ding, Long;
- Arsuaga, Javier;
- Luo, Wenqin
Mice are the most commonly used model animals for itch research and for development of anti-itch drugs. Most laboratories manually quantify mouse scratching behavior to assess itch intensity. This process is labor-intensive and limits large-scale genetic or drug screenings. In this study, we developed a new system, Scratch-AID (Automatic Itch Detection), which could automatically identify and quantify mouse scratching behavior with high accuracy. Our system included a custom-designed videotaping box to ensure high-quality and replicable mouse behavior recording and a convolutional recurrent neural network trained with frame-labeled mouse scratching behavior videos, induced by nape injection of chloroquine. The best trained network achieved 97.6% recall and 96.9% precision on previously unseen test videos. Remarkably, Scratch-AID could reliably identify scratching behavior in other major mouse itch models, including the acute cheek model, the histaminergic model, and a chronic itch model. Moreover, our system detected significant differences in scratching behavior between control and mice treated with an anti-itch drug. Taken together, we have established a novel deep learning-based system that could replace manual quantification for mouse scratching behavior in different itch models and for drug screening.