Reporton.

AHRI report No.43

Topic

Deployment of Automatic Identification and Surveillance Data System on Humane Management of Laboratory Animals

Department

¹ Animal Health Research Institute, Council of Agriculture, Executive Yuan

² Department of Animal Science, Chinese Culture University

³ Graduate Institute of Biomedical and Bioinformatics, National Taiwan University

⁴ Department of Computer Science, Tsing Hua University

Author

Lin W. H.*¹, C. F. CHANG*², W. C. CHANG³, H. Y. Kuo^1,2,Y. C. Lin¹,

C. C. CHEN⁴,C. Y. Kao³,P. H. Chao¹

Summary

The lab-mice cage-system integration of RadioFrequency IDentification (RFID) and sensor data developed with the Wireless Sensor Network Team in Bioinformatics Laboratory of National Taiwan University comprises both the hardware sensor devices of RFID, audio-video recorder, drink load, body temperature/weight, and jogging wheel and as well the software application systems for conducting statistical data analysis. The databases for the hardware system were developed with MatLab and Delphi/Java programming languages. The software performance is capable of concurrent processing of data generated from 8 or more lab-mice within effective thresholds for data entry. With this nearly no stress lab-mice cage system we have developed a humane regimen for the practice of long-term animal model studies. The data collected using the cage system RFID during a 31-day experiment indicates that each mouse may show a highly variable daily performance according to the experimental parameters used in this study. The measurements of the various physiological responses by this lab-mice cage system of humane management infers that most conventional lab-mice studies introduce inadvertent errors created by opportunistically scheduled dates and day-night inverse stress on lab-mice. This lab-mice cage system of humane management represents a convenient solution for reducing the risks of observer-induced errors caused by researcher-animal interactions. In conclusion, researchers employing our cage system RFID may accomplish the goals of securing optimal data and achieving low stress animal management; this in turn greatly enhances animal trial safety and accuracy of any experiments.

Keyword

Lab Mice, RFID, Sensor Data, Automatic Entry, System Integration.