Freezing-Point

"A User-Friendly Software for Automated Scoring of Freezing Behavior in Rodent Models"

Behavioral analysis based on video recording has become the norm in neuroscience research. However, the automatic and accurate extraction of freezing sequences remains a bottleneck for many researchers using the fear conditioning protocol. Most of the available software either have numerous parameters that are unclear and difficult for users to evaluate, or an analysis method that depends on the equipment used for data acquisition and is not sufficiently adaptable to the various experimental conditions that exist.
Freezing-Point facilitates the transparency and accessibility of video analysis and offers a highly automated solution with interactive visualization tools that allow users to intuitively adjust settings to match what they observe. The software is simple and user-friendly enough that it does not require extensive training or reading complex documentation.

What's more, FreezingPoint has been validated to reliably and robustly extract freezing events in fear conditionning experiments that can handle several datas as input, videos or tracks files produced by markerless pose estimation software as DeepLabCut or SLEAP, across different protocole, and from video with different quality. In practice, FreezingPoint provides an open-source freezing analysis software with user-friendly interactive visualizations to explore parameters and validate results to keep the user close to his data.

Quick tutorial

freezing-point_quickTuto.mp4

See USER GUIDE for more details
videos for test and sleap model for pose estimation can be download on HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/gillescourtand

To cite the software, please use DOI

How to INSTALL

- install miniconda : https://www.anaconda.com/docs/getting-started/miniconda/main
- download freezing_env.yml
- open an anaconda prompt
- goto the place where you download the yml file: cd Downloads
- enter the command: conda env create -f freezing_env. yml
- install git: https://git-scm.com/
- launch git gui
- click on the menu "clone existing directory"
- in your internet navigator go to https://github.com/gillescourtand/Freezing-Point/tree/main/v1.0.2
- copy path: on the project page: <> Code/clone using the web url (or dowload zip file)
- paste into "source location" in git gui
- indicate where you want to create this folder
- click on "clone"

In anaconda prompt:

• go to the folder you just created: cd: path/to/project_folder
  
• launch: python FreezingPoint_1_0_2.py