Automated classification of acoustic startle reflex waveforms in young CBA/CaJ mice using machine learning

Background: The acoustic startle response (ASR) is a simple reflex that results in a whole body motor response after animals hear a brief loud sound and is used as a multisensory tool across many disciplines. Unfortunately, a method of how to record, process, and analyze ASRs has yet to be standardized, leading to high variability in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of ASRs within and between laboratories.

New method: ASR waveforms collected from young adult CBA/CaJ mice were normalized with features extracted from the waveform, the resulting power spectral density estimates, and the continuous wavelet transforms. The features were then partitioned into training and test/validation sets. Machine learning methods from different families of algorithms were used to combine startle-related features into robust predictive models to predict whether an ASR waveform is a startle or non-startle.

Results: An ensemble of several machine learning models resulted in an extremely robust model to predict whether an ASR waveform is a startle or non-startle with a mean ROC of 0.9779, training accuracy of 0.9993, and testing accuracy of 0.9301.

Comparison with existing methods: ASR waveforms analyzed using the threshold and RMS techniques resulted in over 80% of accepted startles actually being non-startles when manually classified versus 2.2% for the machine learning method, resulting in statistically significant differences in ASR metrics (such as startle amplitude and pre-pulse inhibition) between classification methods.

Conclusions: The machine learning approach presented in this paper can be adapted to nearly any ASR paradigm to accurately process, sort, and classify startle responses.