Toward Markerless Video-based Tremor Analysis: Objective Quantification of Pathological Tremor in Mouse Preclinical Models

Abstract

Tremor is a movement disorder characterized by involuntary, rhythmic oscillations of body parts and is a hallmark of several neurological conditions, including Parkinson's disease and essential tremor. Elucidating its underlying mechanisms relies heavily on mouse models, which offer genetic manipulability and translational relevance to human neural circuitry. Accordingly, these models are indispensable for studying tremor pathophysiology. So far, electromyography and accelerometers have been used as methods to quantitatively observe tremors in mice. However, these methods have several drawbacks, such as high costs and complex setups. In particular, the invasive surgical implantation of devices causes significant stress to the animals. Although RGB-based methods offer non-invasive and cost-effective alternatives, they often lack the sensitivity required to detect subtle tremors. Therefore, this paper addresses these challenges by achieving mouse tremor severity estimation using conventional RGB cameras only. To address the challenging task of isolating tremor-related vibrations while the mouse itself is also in motion, our pipeline incorporates segmentation-based pre-processing to extract the mouse region and a Tremor Score Estimation Module that captures subtle tremors with high sensitivity. In the experiments, we assessed tremors in unrestrained mice using a non-invasive method with two standard cameras. The results demonstrated a strong correlation with accelerometer measurements and confirmed that the method accurately captured the intensity-dependent characteristics of tremors. The project page is available at https://isogawalab.github.io/Video-based-Tremor-Analysis-Project/.