Fear-Mouse Tracker (FMT): An open-source toolkit to track innate defensive behaviors with high precision

In the past years, machine-learning-based approaches to track animal poses with high spatial and temporal resolution have become available, but toolkits to extract, integrate, and analyze coordinate datasets in a user-friendly manner have lagged behind. Here, we introduce Fear-Mouse Tracker (FMT), a simple and open-source MATLAB-based pipeline to extract and quantitatively analyze DeepLabCut-derived coordinates of mice presented with threatening stimuli that commonly trigger innate defensive responses. This framework allows for unbiased quantitative estimations of stretch-attend posture (SAP) observed during risk assessment behaviors, as well as for measurements of the timing and extent of freezing and escape responses that follow the presentation of threatening stimuli such as a predator odor, or sweeping and looming stimuli resembling predator approaches. FMT is specially designed for users not very experienced in using programming languages, thus making it more accessible to a broader audience.