Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ZebraZoom (ZebraZoom: Kinematic analysis for drug and genetic screening in zebrafish)
Reporting period: 2018-12-01 to 2020-11-30
The emergence of zebrafish as a genetic model of interest for large scale genetic and pharmacological studies has brought a revolution to animal research. Numerous studies aiming to find drugs for treatment of human pathologies involving cancer, neurodegeneration or pathogen infections require an easy pipeline to test the effects of the drugs on model of pathology in vivo as well as their possible side effects on development, metabolism or behavior. The ZebraZoom project has enabled to generate an algorithm for tracking single animals alone or in groups over many wells and for very long durations. In 2020, we have made the tracking algorithm open access and we have developed a deep learning approach to combine postural analysis with kinematic analysis. Over the last year, customers across the world in Asia, Europe, Oceania and America have requested to use ZebraZoom for their data on zebrafish or other animal species. Our algorithm improves with the increasing community of users sending feedback and requesting additions to new applications, stages and even species.