Kinoscope

The Psychopharmacolgy Research Group is developing a new computer program for scoring behavioural experiments. This program takes over from similar previous excellent free solutions available to the academic community, and brings the freshness of a modern, actively developed project which will eventually evolve over the coming years.

Key Features

• Integrated solution for managing & administrating behavioural experiments along with behavioural scoring facilities
• Multi-user program organized around the “project” concept, in which many behavioural test can be incorporated
• Supports an expanding list of behavioural tests (currently Forced Swim Test, Elevated Plus Maze, Novel/Spatial Object Recognition)
• Flexible to define research site-specific variations in supported behavioural tests, through the “behavioural test templates” feature
• Outputs results in the compatible csv format for importing in spreadsheets and statistical programs
• Predefined calculation like latencies in FST, per-cent of time in open arms in the EPM, discrimination & preference indices in object recognition
• Many more to come soon!

How to Get it

The program is currently under active development. A working version is already used in the Department of Pharmacology and collaborating Laboratories. However, it is still considered as “beta” version and interested researchers should first make sure that the program satisfies their needs before using it.

You can download the latest version from Sourceforge

A manual, explaining most functions, is also available at Sourceforge

Suggestions?

What if something important is missing? Since we are interested in developing this program, we would be most happy if you would contact us and let us know what’s missing. We will do our best to incorporate reasonable demands for features.

We advise to either visit this webpage often, or better email us that you are using the program, so that we can notify you of updated versions. We will not share or use your email for any other purposes than notifying for new versions.

How to cite it

A reference for the program can be found at:

Kokras N, Baltas D, Theocharis F, Dalla, C. Kinoscope: An Open-Source Computer Program for Behavioral Pharmacologists. 2017 May; doi: 103389/fnbeh.2017.00088. Pubmed PMID: 28553211.

If you want to see Kinoscope in action you can alo look at:

1) Kokras N, Antoniou K, Mikail HG, Kafetzopoulos V, Papadopoulou-Daifoti Z, Dalla C. Forced swim test: What about females? Neuropharmacology. 2015 Dec;99:408-21. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropharm.2015.03.016. PubMed PMID: 25839894

and:

2) Kokras N, Polissidis A, Antoniou K, Dalla C. Head shaking in the forced swim test: A robust but unexplored sex difference. Pharmacol Biochem Behav. 2017 Jan;152:90-96. doi: 10.1016/j.pbb.2016.05.007. PMID: 27184928

The development of Kinoscope has been partially funded by an IKY-Siemens Fellowship of Excellence for Postgraduate Studies 

Screenshots

(click to enlarge)