RodEx: Rodent Exploration Analyzer (MATLAB toolbox v1.0.0)

RodEx v1.0.0 (Rodent Exploration Analyzer) is an open-source MATLAB toolbox designed for automated tracking and behavioural analysis of rodents from overhead video recordings. The software provides an end-to-end processing pipeline, including image segmentation, threshold calibration, animal detection, centroid and head tracking, locomotor metrics computation, object exploration quantification, and occupancy heatmap generation. RodEx was developed to streamline the analysis of behavioural assays in freely moving rodents, generating standardized quantitative outputs for subsequent statistical analysis. This repository includes the core execution scripts, auxiliary functions, documentation, and example workflows necessary to reproduce the behavioural processing pipeline. RodEx was built in MATLAB and requires the Image Processing Toolbox. This software is distributed alongside the associated manuscript ("Inhibitory tone in the dentate gyrus dynamically prioritizes memory flexibility or stability by tuning a sensitivity–consistency continuum", submitted to PLoS Biology) to support transparency, computational reproducibility, and open science practices. This record contains the analysis codebase.