ANY-maze Help > I/O devices supported by ANY-maze > Test equipment designed specifically for ANY-maze > The Orofacial pain assessment device (OPAD) cage > Performing experiments with the OPAD cage > Running tests in an OPAD cage

Running tests in an OPAD cage

Introduction

Having set up a protocol for your OPAD cage, you are now ready to use it in an experiment. In this topic, we'll create a very simple experiment, run a test, and take a quick look at some of the results. Clearly a 'real' experiment would be more sophisticated, but you should find it easy to build on the basic experiment described here.

Creating the experiment and loading the OPAD protocol

If you have just completed the steps in Creating an ANY-maze protocol for OPAD, then you won't need to do anything here, as you will already have an experiment open which will contain the OPAD protocol. Otherwise, you will need to do the following:

Adding some treatments and animals

With the OPAD protocol loaded, you can add the treatment groups and animals for your experiment. We're going to add just two groups with 2 animals each, but of course you could set up a more sophisticated experiment.

Figure 1. The Treatments section of the Experiment page is used to add treatment groups to an experiment.

Specify the animals' treatments

Although in the previous step you will have specified the different treatment groups that your experiment will include, and the number of animals within each group, this doesn't actually tell ANY-maze which animal should be given which treatment - for example, Animal 1 should have which treatment, the first one? And animal 2, the first treatment too?

So, the next thing you need to do is specify which treatment each animal should receive. In fact, as well as entering the animal's treatments, you can at the same time specify other information about them, such as their weight or sex - this depends on whether you included any fields when you set up your protocol.

To enter the data about the animals' treatments, you should:

2.

Click the View animals button in the ribbon bar

5.

If you want to view the treatments again, just click the View treatments button

Figure 2. The Animals spreadsheet. In this example, the protocol includes fields for the animals' sex and weight, so the spreadsheet includes columns for this data.

When entering the animals' treatments, you need to specify the treatment code. This is because, by default, ANY-maze performs experiments blind, so you don't know which treatment is which. Of course, someone has to know this, and you can find out what the treatment codes are by clicking the Reveal treatment coding button in the ribbon bar.

Performing a test

The details given in this section assume you will use an animal to run this test, but you can use your hand if you prefer; to do this, just touch your thumb on the cage floor and simultaneously touch a finger to the bottle spout and/or thermal elements - this will simulate an animal licking or making contact.

You're now ready to perform a test.

Figure 3. The Test schedule report lists all the tests in an experiment. Here the next test to perform will be a test on Animal 1 and the system is ready to start the test.

4.

Once the element is at the start temperature, you can start the test. Place the animal in the apparatus and then either press the push-button on the front of the OPAD cage control box, or click the shown just above the status on the screen.

Figure 4. During a test, ANY-maze will display charts showing what's happening in the cage.

There's nothing for you to do while a test is running, but we can take the opportunity to learn a little about the charts. As you can see in figure 4, the charts default to showing one minute of data and when the chart gets 'full', it will start to scroll automatically. This is useful, as it means you can see what's happening now, but if you want to see what happened more than one minute ago you can't because the data will have scrolled off the left edge of the chart. To address this, you can simply use the mouse to drag the chart. You can also change the chart's width from 'one minute' to some other value - to do this, right-click on the chart and use the menu options that appear. You see that there are other options too; try them out to see what they do - you can't do any harm.

You can stop your experiment at any point (except when a test is actually running) and close the experiment file; when you reopen the experiment, testing will just pick up from where you left off.

Viewing results

After performing a test, you can view its results in the pane on the left side of the Tests page.

Figure 5. The test numbers on the Test schedule report are links; clicking one will take you to the Test details report.

Figure 6. The Test details report includes results of the test.

As can be seen in figure 6, various results are shown, including such things as the number of times the animal made contact with the thermal elements (Contact : number of activations), the amount of time the animal was in contact (Contact : time active) and the average temperature at which the animal broke contact.

In fact, many other results are also available, and you can tailor this list by clicking the link shown just above the result values. Any changes you make become part of the protocol, so they'll apply to all the tests in the experiment and, if you save the protocol, to all experiments that use the protocol.

What next?

In this topic, we learnt how to perform tests within an OPAD and we also looked at the results of an individual test. However, ANY-maze can do much more than just show you the results of each test individually, and this is what we'll explore in the final section of this tutorial - Analysing the results of OPAD experiments

See also:

The topics listed below are general topics relating to ANY-maze and may refer to features not available or required with OPAD.

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ANY-maze help topic T1202