Spinal cord injury (SCI) causes locomotion deficits to animals. It is important to find a reliable approach to evaluate locomotor function loss and recovery after spinal cord injury. Basso Mouse Scale (BMS) is a general observational system for assessing functional recovery after SCI. However, BMS has limitations of subjective, nonlinear, and bias while kinematic analysis with a high-speed camera can be a more sensitive way to assess locomotor function. Here I showed that kinematic analysis of the hind leg is a good way to evaluate locomotion function after SCI. Gait parameters of angles of different joints and relative positions of horizontal hindlimb were used to compare between different mice and different days after hemi-crush injury. To compare two evaluations, principal c...[ Read more ]

Spinal cord injury (SCI) causes locomotion deficits to animals. It is important to find a reliable approach to evaluate locomotor function loss and recovery after spinal cord injury. Basso Mouse Scale (BMS) is a general observational system for assessing functional recovery after SCI. However, BMS has limitations of subjective, nonlinear, and bias while kinematic analysis with a high-speed camera can be a more sensitive way to assess locomotor function. Here I showed that kinematic analysis of the hind leg is a good way to evaluate locomotion function after SCI. Gait parameters of angles of different joints and relative positions of horizontal hindlimb were used to compare between different mice and different days after hemi-crush injury. To compare two evaluations, principal component analysis (PCA) for parameters obtained from kinematic gaits (the hip, knee, ankle and paw) was compared to BMS. The locomotor deficits of hemi-crush mice cannot be distinguished by BMS in second-day post-injury (DPI), but kinematic analysis with PCA can distinguish the difference between them. Altogether, the system with high-speed video recording can precisely detect mice functional recovery after SCI.