Russia Develops AI Tool to Study Stress
The neural network automates the analysis of animal behavior in medical research, saving scientists hundreds of hours of manual work.
Russian specialists at Yandex have developed an artificial intelligence system that helps researchers analyze how stress affects behavior. The tool is expected to accelerate the search for new treatments for emotional disorders in humans.
Saving More Than 500 Hours of Manual Work
The tool was created by teams at Yandex Crowd Solutions and the Yandex Cloud Center for Technology for Society for researchers at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Previously, scientists had to manually annotate video recordings of laboratory mouse experiments, a process that could take up to an hour to analyze just ten minutes of footage. A single study often required processing dozens of hours of video.
The new AI system completes the same task in minutes, automating about 90 percent of the analysis. This has already saved more than 500 hours of manual labor. The system consists of two components: one accurately identifies key points on an animal’s body, while the other recognizes its actions and posture. Action recognition accuracy exceeds 89 percent.
According to the developers, automated labeling captures events with frame-level precision, eliminating subjective errors and making data more objective. This represents a significant step in the digital transformation of laboratory research.
Accessibility and Open Use
What sets the development apart is its accessibility. The team plans to publish the tool’s code in the near future, allowing researchers worldwide to use it in their own projects. The finished system will also be available to other research groups upon request.
The Yandex Crowd Solutions team is prepared to assist with labeling complex datasets to adapt the solution to specific research tasks. The platform is designed to scale such projects quickly.
The development is significant not only for Russia, but for the global scientific community. It opens new opportunities in neuroscience and psychiatry, bringing researchers closer to effective approaches for addressing stress and its consequences.
