Megabouts: a flexible pipeline for zebrafish locomotion analysis

Abstract

Accurate quantification of animal behavior is crucial for advancing neuroscience and for defining reliable physiological markers. We introduce Megabouts (megabouts.ai), a software package standardizing zebrafish larvae locomotion analysis across experimental setups. Its flexibility, achieved with a Transformer neural network, allows the classification of actions regardless of tracking methods or frame rates. We demonstrate Megabouts' ability to quantify sensorimotor transformations and enhance sensitivity to drug-induced phenotypes through high-throughput, high-resolution behavioral analysis.