Calibrating for water maze in HVS Image is quick and easy, as it’s specifically designed for water maze and all that’s involved in running and analysing water maze experiments. Consequently you only need to provide information specific to your particular set-up – pool surface and platform diameters (2 text entries), pool surface position (4 clicks), pool color (0 or 1 click), and platform positions (1 click for typical MWM positions) – and these are all on a single, simple calibration screen with no extra menus to go through.

This allows the user to get started quickly, remain focused on the science and avoid the human error that can otherwise creep in and invalidate your experiments. This contrasts with ‘jack of all trade’ tracking software that claims to cover all maze types but does so by requiring the user to create the protocol for each one – selecting, defining or typing in everything from the type of apparatus, the zones of interest (e.g. quadrants), what data is wanted, what the software has to do during trials and much else – taking over 70 clicks and 20 text entries in one commonly used piece of software.

With HVS Image there is no need to create the protocol, select the apparatus, select which part of the apparatus to use for the size, split it into the quadrants and name them, define and name the platform positions (unless you want to define special (rather than typical) positions, which you can easily do), as simply clicking into the Morris water maze module in HVS tells the system to set up for water maze. Likewise there is no laborious process needed to set up what the software should do in different stages – 1 click on the tracking screen defines whether you want acquisition trials to end automatically as soon as the animal reaches the platform position or after a delay you specify, or manually (when you click to end the trial), and another 1 click sets Probe trial mode.