RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Combination of Defined CatWalk Gait Parameters for Predictive Locomotion Recovery in Experimental Spinal Cord Injury Rat Models
JF eneuro
JO eNeuro
FD Society for Neuroscience
SP ENEURO.0497-20.2021
DO 10.1523/ENEURO.0497-20.2021
VO 8
IS 2
A1 Ivanna K. Timotius
A1 Lara Bieler
A1 Sebastien Couillard-Despres
A1 Beatrice Sandner
A1 Daniel Garcia-Ovejero
A1 Florencia Labombarda
A1 Veronica Estrada
A1 Hans W. Müller
A1 Jürgen Winkler
A1 Jochen Klucken
A1 Bjoern Eskofier
A1 Norbert Weidner
A1 Radhika Puttagunta
YR 2021
UL http://www.eneuro.org/content/8/2/ENEURO.0497-20.2021.abstract
AB In many preclinical spinal cord injury (SCI) studies, assessment of locomotion recovery is key to understanding the effectiveness of the experimental intervention. In such rat SCI studies, the most basic locomotor recovery scoring system is a subjective observation of animals freely roaming in an open field, the Basso Beattie Bresnahan (BBB) score. In comparison, CatWalk is an automated gait analysis system, providing further parameter specifications. Although together the CatWalk parameters encompass gait, studies consistently report single parameters, which differ in significance from other behavioral assessments. Therefore, we believe no single parameter produced by the CatWalk can represent the fully-coordinated motion of gait. Typically, other locomotor assessments, such as the BBB score, combine several locomotor characteristics into a representative score. For this reason, we ranked the most distinctive CatWalk parameters between uninjured and SC injured rats. Subsequently, we combined nine of the topmost parameters into an SCI gait index score based on linear discriminant analysis (LDA). The resulting combination was applied to assess gait recovery in SCI experiments comprising of three thoracic contusions, a thoracic dorsal hemisection, and a cervical dorsal column lesion model. For thoracic lesions, our unbiased machine learning model revealed gait differences in lesion type and severity. In some instances, our LDA was found to be more sensitive in differentiating recovery than the BBB score alone. We believe the newly developed gait parameter combination presented here should be used in CatWalk gait recovery work with preclinical thoracic rat SCI models.