Harnessing the power of digital caging and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve animal welfare and husbandry operations at Rutgers University-New Brunswick - Abstract: Rutgers the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick campus requests funds to purchase and outfit fourteen Individually ventilated racks (IVC) in the facility with Digital Ventilated Cage (DVC) retrofit kits and Rack Environmental Monitoring (REM) system supplied by Tecniplast. The animal facility currently serves the needs of federally funded multidisciplinary faculty associated with the various schools within the university. The project will enable the conversion of the existing mouse caging system to an advanced caging system that uses machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor the animals 24 x7. This advanced caging system will provide us with multiple cage and room monitoring capabilities, all of which are not currently available in the facility. The integrated DVC system includes sophisticated sensors along with a software analytics interface that is easy to use for the animal care takers in the room as well as management personnel for decision making. The individual sensor boards for each cage will detect the microenvironment within the cage (activity of animals, presence of food, water, bedding condition) while the rack level REM device will monitor the macroenvironment (temperature, humidity, lighting, noise, vibration, and human presence). Information captured from these systems will help 1) streamline operations through the ability to identify each cage and track census at all times, 2) improve animal welfare through detection of sick animals early leading to timely veterinary intervention, 3) identification of wet bedding or floods in a cage, 4) identify low food or lack of water bottle in cage, 5) timing of humane end-points to assist with both welfare and tissue/sample collection, 6) identify variables that can affect research reproducibility and help management correct the variable in a timely manner and 7) improve operational efficiency. Digital capture of information and the ability to view the information remotely will help streamline workflows and enable staff to spend less time on administrative tasks and devote more time to animal care.
