A run-length encoding approach for path analysis of \textit{C. elegans} search behavior

DOI10.1155/2016/3516089MaRDI QIDQ519625zbMATH OpenOpenAlexDBLPWikidataFDO

Authors Li Huang, Hongkyun Kim, Jacob Furst, Daniela Stan Raicu

Publication date 5 April 2017

Published in Computational \& Mathematical Methods in Medicine (Search for Journal in Brave)

Copyright license Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.1155/2016/3516089

zbMATH Keywords

Caenorhabditis elegansmovement behaviorsharp turnsstring data

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Computational methods for problems pertaining to biology (92-08) Biomechanics (92C10) Physiological, cellular and medical topics (92C99)

Review text

Summary: The nematode \textit{Caenorhabditis elegans} explores the environment using a combination of different movement patterns, which include straight movement, reversal, and turns. We propose to quantify \textit{C. elegans} movement behavior using a computer vision approach based on run-length encoding of step-length data. In this approach, the path of \textit{C. elegans} is encoded as a string of characters, where each character represents a path segment of a specific type of movement. With these encoded string data, we perform \(k\)-means cluster analysis to distinguish movement behaviors resulting from different genotypes and food availability. We found that shallow and sharp turns are the most critical factors in distinguishing the differences among the movement behaviors. To validate our approach, we examined the movement behavior of \textit{tph-1} mutants that lack an enzyme responsible for serotonin biosynthesis. A \(k\)-means cluster analysis with the path string-encoded data showed that \textit{tph-1} movement behavior on food is similar to that of wild-type animals off food. We suggest that this run-length encoding approach is applicable to trajectory data in animal or human mobility data.

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Cites work

• Random forests

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(8)

• Long-tail behavior in locomotion of \textit{Caenorhabditis elegans}
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