Scientists at the University of Michigan have developed an open-source, user-friendly, artificial intelligence driven software called LabGym that automatizes animal behavior analysis in various model systems and could be a boon to life scientists across the spectrum of basic science and drug development. The findings were published in the article"LabGym: quantification of user-defined animal behaviors using learning-based holistic assessment," in the journal Cell Reports Methods on February 24. Measuring animal behavior is instrumental in understanding fundamental neural processes as well as assessing therapeutic and adverse effects of drugs. Bing Ye, PhD, professor of life sciences at the University of Michigan, and his team analyze movements and behaviors in the model organism Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies) to understand mechanisms involved in the development and function of the nervous system in humans. "Behavior is a function of the brain. So, analyzing animal behavior provides essential information about how the brain works and how it changes in response to disease," said Yujia Hu, a neuroscientist in Ye's lab and lead author of the study.

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.