General presentation and development history

Since 2008 Bioseb has presented a DYNAMIC WEIGHT BEARING test, a new PAIN test with a floor instrumented cage and a combined video acquisition. The manual version of it is now completed by a fully automated, operator independent instrument. The DWB allows to measure independently the weight bore by each limb of a freely moving animal (rats or mice).
The system has been deeply and intensively used by many customers from private firms and academic labs since 2008.
The result of this “live” experiment is summarised in a recent publication in Physiology & Behavior from the team of Dr Sarret Sherbrooke (CANADA) and shows that usual ipsilateral/contralateral hindpaw weight ratio overestimate the effect of an analgesic drug.
Using the DWB results as percentage of each paws over body weight is more close to the reality. The study performed with mice and rats on three models of PAIN (inflammatory, cancer, neuropathic) reveals also that the forepaw compensation is an important indication in the load pattern redistribution.
Other tackle points are the possibilities offered by the DWB like a more natural long observation period (5 minutes) done without operator (stress) and without any habituation period. This turns definitively the DWB to the next generation of instruments improved for drugs screening and optimization of preclinical models.

AUTOMATED DYNAMIC WEIGHT BEARING

Performing the same measures as the manual Version (Dynamic Weight Bearing: New Incapacitance Test), the AUTOMATED DWB (Dynamic Weight Bearing) improves 2 of the turnkey points of the system: the speed of operation and the operator independant factor. The automated DWB allows to reduce the most important phase of the process by a factor of 8 to 10, thus the analysis of 1 animal will take 1 to 2 minutes and be operator independant.
The results are presented as in the manual version but will asks for a minimal manpower and many more animal analysis are done in the same amount of time. The Software gives the weight distribution of the animal (rat or mouse), per limb, with additional ratio computations and filtering options.

For a full description of the output data’s please refer to the Basic Dynamic Weigt Bearing (DWB) webpage.

Versions and setup

All current users are eligible to the upgrade which in composed of a software, a high resolution USB camera and a special designed cover. New customers have the choice between the Basic version and the Automatic version.

The instrument and its camera does not require special lighting conditions but day light conditions. Direct close illumination may be avoided.

The basal feature remains accessible from the new version if necessary especially to train new lab users previous to switch to the automated analysis or simply to validate the results.

The AUTOMATIC DWB is available in three setups RAT (BIO-DWB-AT-R), MICE (BIO-DWB-AT-RM), COMBINED RAT MICE (BIO-DWB-AT-DUAL).