LaViDa Validation Dataset: Manual vs. Automated Escape Latency Measurements in the Morris Water Maze

This dataset contains the paired manual versus LaViDa (automated software) escape latency measurements used for the methodological validation reported in the associated manuscript, "LaViDa: an open-source, validated software for automated Morris water maze video analysis." The dataset comprises 516 valid paired comparisons obtained from 54 Wistar rats across four experimental phases: three acquisition phases (Learning 1, Learning 2, Learning 3; up to three within-session trials per animal per phase) and a Memory Task (one trial per animal, conducted eight days after training completion). For each trial, escape latency was measured independently by a trained human observer using a manual stopwatch (ground truth) and by LaViDa v1.3.0 using automated video tracking. Column descriptions: Animal_ID: Unique identifier for each rat Group: Experimental group / treatment condition Phase: Experimental phase (Learning1, Learning2, Learning3, or MemoryTask) Trial: Within-session trial number (1–3); Memory Task has a single trial per animal Manual_latency_s: Escape latency (s) measured by human observer Software_latency_s: Escape latency (s) measured automatically by LaViDa Software_distance_cm: Total swimming distance (cm) measured by LaViDa Software_velocity_cms: Mean swimming velocity (cm/s) measured by LaViDa Absolute_error_s: |Software_latency_s − Manual_latency_s| This dataset supports the correlation, agreement (ICC, Bland-Altman), and error analyses (MAE, RMSE) reported in the manuscript's Results section.