Contactless Anesthesia Monitoring in Spontanously Breathing Rodents

• Published in: 2019 41st Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC) Vol. 2019; pp. 6077 - 6080
• Main Authors: Kunczik, Janosch, Pereira, Carina Barbosa, Wassermann, Laura, Hager, Christine, Bleich, Andre, Zieglowski, Leonie, Tolba, Rene, Czaplik, Michael
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01-07-2019
• Subjects: Anesthesia; Correlation; Electrocardiography; Feature extraction; Monitoring; Rodents
• ISSN: 1557-170X; 1558-4615
• DOI: 10.1109/EMBC.2019.8856869

Laboratory animal science plays a crucial role in medical and biological research. In the last decades, stricter regulations were enforced to safeguard laboratory animals. Following the "3Rs" guiding principles, animal trials should be replaced, reduced and refined, whenever possible.A contactless modality capable of assessing the respiratory rate (RR) and additional breath related characteristics can potentially refine anesthetic interventions in rodents by continuously monitoring their anesthetic depth. This can reduce complications and thus the number of needed animals.We were able to extract the instantaneous RR in rodents with a sum squared error (SSE) of 0.26 breaths/min from color video. A correlation of 0.9781 compared to an Electrocardiography (ECG) based reference was achieved. Furthermore, additional temporal and morphological characteristics were extracted, which are sensitive for changes in the anesthetic depth.