ANY-maze Help > I/O devices supported by ANY-maze > Legacy I/O devices > The Parallel Rod floor test > Performing experiments with the Parallel Rod cage > Running tests in a Parallel Rod cage

Running tests in a Parallel Rod cage

Introduction

Having set up a protocol for your Parallel Rod 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 Parallel Rod floor test protocol

If you have just completed the steps in Setting up a Parallel Rod floor test protocol, then you won't need to do anything here, as you will already have an experiment open which will contain the Parallel Rod floor test protocol. Otherwise, you will need to do the following:

Adding some treatments and animals

With the Parallel Rod floor test 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.

Specifying 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 the animals, 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.

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.

If the test is ready to start, simply place the animal in the apparatus. The protocol we set up earlier will have been set up to automatically start tests, which means that ANY-,maze will see your movements as you put the animal into the apparatus, and as you move your arm out of the apparatus, it will detect this and automatically start the test. (Alternatively, you could set up your protocol not to automatically start tests, in which case you would need to click the shown just above the status on the screen, once the animal is in the apparatus).

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 the results of a test

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

Figure 4. The test numbers on the Test schedule report are links; clicking one will take you to the Test details report.

Figure 5. 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 distance the animal travelled, the number of times the animal's paw slipped through the grid (Foot slip: number of activations), and the 'Ataxia ratio', which you many remember from earlier as the number of foot slips per metre travelled.

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 a Parallel Rod cage 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 Parallel Rod floor test experiments

See also:

The topics listed below are general topics relating to ANY-maze and may refer to features not available or required for the Parallel Rod floor test.

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ANY-maze help topic T1249