Zebrafish Video Analysis System for High-Throughput Drug Assay

Abstract

Zebrafish swimming behavior is used in a new, automated drug assay system as a biomarker to measure drug efficiency to prevent or restore hearing loss. This system records video of zebrafish larvae under infrared lighting using Raspberry Pi cameras and measures fish swimming behavior. This automated system significantly reduces the operator time required to process experiments in parallel. Multiple tanks, each consisting of sixteen experiments are operated in parallel. Once a set of experiments starts, all data transfer and processing operations are automatic. A web interface allows the operator to configure, monitor and control the experiments and review reports. Ethernet connects the various hardware components, allowing loose coupling of the distributed software used to schedule and run the experiments. The operator can configure the data processing to be done on the local computer or offloaded to a high-performance computer cluster to achieve even higher throughput. Computationally efficient image processing algorithms provided automated zebrafish detection and motion analysis. Quantitative assessment of error in the position and orientation of the detected fish uses manual data analysis by human observers as the reference. The system error in orientation and position is comparable to human inter-operator error.