Real-time application of the Rat Grimace Scale as a welfare refinement in laboratory rats
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rodent grimace scales have been recently validated for pain assessment, allowing evaluation of facial expressions associated with pain. The standard scoring method is retrospective, limiting its application beyond pain research. This study aimed to assess if real-time application of the Rat Grimace Scale (RGS) could reliably and accurately assess pain in rats when compared to the standard method. Thirty-two male and female Sprague-Dawley rats were block randomized into three treatment groups: buprenorphine (0.03 mg/kg, subcutaneously), multimodal analgesia (buprenorphine [0.03 mg/kg] and meloxicam [2 mg/kg], subcutaneously), or saline, followed by intra-plantar carrageenan. Real-time observations (interval and point) were compared to the standard RGS method using concurrent video-recordings. Real-time interval observations reflected the results from the standard RGS method by successfully discriminating between analgesia and saline treatments. Real-time point observations showed poor discrimination between treatments. Real-time observations showed minimal bias (<0.1) and acceptable limits of agreement. These results indicate that applying the RGS in real-time through an interval scoring method is feasible and effective, allowing refinement of laboratory rat welfare through rapid identification of pain and early intervention.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it