Get a quick insight into the power and simplicity of ANY maze
This brief video introduces some of the key elements of ANY-maze, highlighting its power, flexibility and ease of use.
Tracking in ANY-maze requires no special set-up or parameters - you put the animal in the apparatus and it tracks
This is the case even in low contrast or in the presence of reflections. And it doesn’t just track the centre of the animal - the system tracks the whole body and, in rodents, it tracks the head and tail too.
ANY-maze doesn’t predefine anything about the apparatus in which it will be tracking
You draw the apparatus yourself and divide it into any number of areas that interest you. You can then create zones from these area and the system will report a plethora of results for each one. You can also define sequences of movements between the areas and the program will detect when they occur. What's more, you can edit everything at any time, even after tests have been performed.
ANY-maze can track in live images from a camera, or in pre-recorded video files
ANY-maze works with images from a wide range of cameras, including inexpensive web-cams, and it can track the animal 'live' while at the same time recording a video of the test; it can do this with up to 16 cameras simultaneously.
Working live like this saves time, but if you prefer you can use ANY-maze (or any other software or digital camera) to record videos of your experiment and then track the animals in the video files later.
ANY-maze can easily be connected to a wealth of devices commonly used in behavioural tests
Devices such as levers, photo-beams, pellet dispensers, shockers, lamps, speakers, etc, can all be easily connected and controlled.
Data from input devices (such as levers) can be used together with the tracking information to control output devices (such as pellet dispensers).
ANY-maze can assess literally hundreds of results for a test and present them in different ways
But don't worry, it’s easy to tell the system to only report the results that interest you, so you won't be swamped with data.
Results can be viewed for an entire test - for example, how far the animal travelled during the test - and can also be easily broken down into time periods - for example, how far the animal travelled in each minute of the test. You can also access plots showing the animal’s track and heat maps showing where the animal spent the most time.
And if you really want the detail, then every value recorded in a test can be accessed in a simple spreadsheet format.
ANY-maze manages complete experiments
In ANY-maze an experiment typically consists of some treatment groups, with each group containing a number of animals. The animals can be tested just once or can receive multiple trials, where the trials can be broken into different stages.
If this all sounds rather familiar, that’s the intention - ANY-maze is designed to work the same way you do. But if you do things a little differently, that’s OK - there’s plenty of flexibility built in, so you never have to adapt to the software, rather it adapts to you.
ANY-maze understands the structure of your experiment, so it’s able to analyse results between different groups
For example, it’s very easy to analyse the results between treatment groups. As you’d expect, this shows group Ns, means and deviations, but ANY-maze goes further - you can use over 30 built in stats tests to perform detailed analysis of the results directly within the system.
That’s not to say that ANY-maze has all the power of a full stats package like SPSS, so you may still want to transfer your results elsewhere for more exhaustive analysis. That’s easy, as the results are laid out in a simple spreadsheet format from which you can either save them or just copy and paste.
