Automated Lever Task with Minimum Antigravity Movement for Rats with Cervical Spinal Cord Injury.
BACKGROUND
Although there is currently no cure for paralysis due to spinal cord injury (SCI), the highest treatment priority is restoring arm and hand function for people with cervical SCI. Preclinical animal models provide an opportunity to test innovative treatments, but severe cervical injury models require significant time and effort to assess responses to novel interventions. Moreover, there is no behavioral task that can assess forelimb movement in rats with severe cervical SCI unable to perform antigravity movements NEW METHOD: We developed a novel lever pressing task for rats with severe cervical SCI. We employed an automated adaptive algorithm to train animals using open-source software and commercially available hardware.


RESULTS
We found that using the adaptive training required only 13.3 ± 2.5 training days to achieve behavioral proficiency. The lever press task could quantify immediate and long-term improvements in severely impaired forelimb function effectively. This behavior platform showed a potential of facilitating rehabilitative training and assessing effects of therapeutic modalities following SCI.


COMPARISON WITH EXISTING METHODS
There is no existing assessment aiming to quantify forelimb extension movement in rodents without function against gravity. We found that the new lever press task in the antigravity environment could assess the severity of cervical SCI as well as the compensatory movement in the proximal forelimb less affected from the injury.


CONCLUSIONS
This study demonstrates that the new behavioral task is capable of tracking the functional changes with various therapies in rats with severe forelimb impairments in a cost- and time-efficient manner.
['Samejima|Soshi|S|', 'Ievins|Aiva M|AM|', 'Boissenin|Adrien|A|', 'Tolley|Nicholas M|NM|', 'Khorasani|Abed|A|', 'Mondello|Sarah E|SE|', 'Moritz|Chet T|CT|']
Cervical spinal cord injury Open-source software Forelimb function Adaptive threshold Automated training Spinal cord stimulation