Posture detection targeted towards providing assessments for the monitoring of health and welfare of pigs has been of great interest to researchers from different disciplines. Existing studies applying machine vision techniques are mostly based on methods using three-dimensional imaging systems, or two-dimensional systems with the limitation of monitoring under controlled conditions. Thus, the main goal of this study was to determine whether a two-dimensional imaging system, along with deep learning approaches, could be utilized to detect the standing and lying (belly and side) postures of pigs under commercial farm conditions. Three deep learning-based detector methods, including faster regions with convolutional neural network features (Faster R-CNN), single shot multibox detector (SSD) and region-based fully convolutional network (R-FCN), combined with Inception V2, Residual Network (ResNet) and Inception ResNet V2 feature extractions of RGB images were proposed. Data from different commercial farms were used for training and validation of the proposed models. The experimental results demonstrated that the R-FCN ResNet101 method was able to detect lying and standing postures with higher average precision (AP) of 0.93, 0.95 and 0.92 for standing, lying on side and lying on belly postures, respectively and mean average precision (mAP) of more than 0.93.

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A specific radioimmunoassay has been developed for determination of human granulocyte elastase in blood. The granulocyte elastase employed as radioiodinated tracer in the assay was inactivated with diisopropylfluorophosphate in order to prevent binding of the tracer to the serum inhibitors a 2 -macroglobulin and ctj-antitrypsin, while still retaining its immunoreactivity. The labelled tracer showed, however, a pronounced tendency to nonspecific binding to serum proteins such as albumin and a 2 -macroglobulin and also to the Sephadex particles. The binding of the labelled tracer to a 2 -macroglobulin caused a false increase in the immunoreactive granulocyte elastase in serum. But the binding of the labelled tracer and its consequences could be circumvented by increasing the NaCl concentration of the reaction mixtures and/or gel filtration buffers. Freshly drawn normal human serum contains about 135 g granulocyte elastase// measured as diisopropylfluorophosphate-inactivated granulocyte elastase. The results of experiments in which serum was fractionated by Sephadex G-100 gel filtration suggest that essentially all of the immunoreactive material in normal human serum is granulocyte elastase bound by a r antitrypsin. This finding implies that granulocyte elastase is released from the cells in an active form and then rapidly bound by the inhibitors.

In literature, piglet mortality is described as a multifactorial complex influenced by factors as litter size, age and health of the sow, farrowing system, management etc. In this study, a parallel comparison was made between two farrowing systems; a temporarily confined (TC) (farrowing-3 days after) versus a loose sow (L). On average, 0.4 more pigs per litter survived until weaning if the sow was temporarily confined (TC) compared with being loose (L). Cause of death was recorded according to a strict template. Underweight and crushing was the most common causes. For crushing, during 1-3 days after birth, an interaction between sow age and farrowing system was observed, with differences between farrowing systems only for intermediate-aged and older sows (>parity 2). There were no significant differences between systems regarding farrowing duration or number of stillborn pigs, but a significant increase in farrowing problems was recorded for TC-sows.

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