Precise kinematic and muscle recording in freely behaving flies enabled by closed-loop tracking and annotation-free pose estimation

Summary Video

Preprint

Supplementary Videos

Video 1. Example video data from the Spotlight system.

Video 2. Design of the Spotlight system.

Video 3. Example synthetic data and contrastively pretrained latent space for behavior.

Video 4. Example 3D keypoint positions predicted by PoseForge.

Video 5. Example body segmentation maps predicted by PoseForge.

Video 6. Replay of reconstructed behavior in NeuroMechFly.

Video 7. Long-tendon muscle activities upon vibration of the arena in flies expressing GCaMP8m in these muscles.

Video 8. Long-tendon muscle fluorescence traces upon vibration in control animals expressing GFP in these muscles.

Hardware

Software

Citation

@article{WangChen2026,
  title        = {Precise kinematic and muscle recording in freely behaving flies enabled by closed-loop tracking and annotation-free pose estimation},
  author       = {Wang-Chen, Sibo and Stimpfling, Victor Alfred and Azcorra, Maite and Ramdya, Pavan},
  year         = 2026,
  month        = mar,
  journal      = {bioRxiv},
  publisher    = {openRxiv},
  doi          = {10.64898/2026.03.11.711180},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.03.11.711180}
}
Wang-Chen et al., 2026.
Precise kinematic and muscle recording in freely behaving flies enabled by closed-loop tracking and annotation-free pose estimation.
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