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The key to automating the Forced swim test is determining what’s struggling versus swimming versus treading water versus floating

Using ANY-maze you simply need to determine immobility sensitivity and duration and ANY-maze will automatically discriminate the periods of mobility and immobility for you. Get all the details on the Benefits tab below.
On the other tabs you'll find recommended equipment and a list of results that are especially useful in the forced swim test.

Page Intro picture

Detecting Immobility

In this video ANY-maze is detecting periods when the animal stops struggling for one second or more.

The results will report, amongst other things, the time the animal was mobile and the time it was immobile (i.e. time struggling and time not struggling).

Immobility detection can be adjusted

Immobility detection in ANY-maze is based on immobility sensitivity (exactly how still the animal has to be) and immobility time (how long it has to stay that way).

In the FST, it’s common to define immobility as the time that the animal spends not making any movements beyond those required to keep its head above water – which would require both immobility sensitivity and time to be set to relatively low values.

And you can change these settings at any time, even after a test is completed. ANY-maze simply re-analyses the data it collected during the tests, which allows you to tease out differences it would be impossible to gather manually.

Immobility detection can be adjusted picture

Testing in multiple apparatus simultaneously

Tracking simultaneously in, for example, four FST tanks is a great way to speed up the throughput in an experiment.

  • Setting up multiple tanks is hardly any more work than setting up one, as most settings are automatically applied across all the apparatus.
  • You can have a single camera for each tank, or you can have multiple tanks viewed by the same camera, or any combination – for example, two cameras each viewing two tanks.
  • Tests in all the apparatus can be run independently, or you can control them together if you prefer.
 Testing in multiple apparatus simultaneously picture

Analysis across time

ANY-maze can analyse most results across time. For example, the image on the right shows a plot of time immobile, based on 30 second time segments and shows how in this experiment, the animals tended to struggle less during the second half of the test.

Analysis across time picture