Novel software tool helps analyze animal behaviors - mJm News Today

A team from the University of Michigan has developed a new software tool to help researchers across the life sciences more efficiently analyze animal behaviors. The open-source software, LabGym, capitalizes on artificial intelligence to identify, categorize and count defined behaviors across various animal model systems. Scientists need to measure animal behaviors for a variety of reasons, from understanding all the ways a particular drug may affect an organism to mapping how circuits in the brain communicate to produce a particular behavior. Researchers in the lab of U-M faculty member Bing Ye, for example, analyze movements and behaviors in Drosophila melanogaster-;or fruit flies-;as a model to study the development and functions of the nervous system. Because fruit flies and humans share many genes, these studies of fruit flies often offer insights into human health and disease.