Infrared thermography detects febrile and behavioural responses to vaccination of weaned piglets

Abstract

An automated, non-invasive system for monitoring of thermoregulation has the potential to mitigate swine diseases through earlier detection. Measurement of radiated temperature of groups of animals by infrared thermography (IRT) is an essential component of such a system. This study reports on the feasibility of monitoring the radiated temperature of groups of animals as a biomarker of immune response using vaccination as a model for febrile disease. In Study A, weaned pigs were either treated with an intramuscular vaccine (FarrowSure Gold), a sham injection of 0.9% saline or left as untreated controls. An infrared thermal camera (FLIR A320) was fixed to the ceiling directly above the pen of animals, and recorded infrared images of the treatment groups at 5 min intervals. The effect on temperature of the spatial distribution of pigs within the pen was significant, with higher temperatures recorded when pigs were grouped together into a single cluster. A higher frequency of clustering behaviour was observed in vaccinated animals compared with controls during a period of the afternoon ~4 to 7 h post-vaccination. The daily mean of the maximum image temperature was significantly higher in vaccinated animals compared with control and sham-treated animals. In the vaccination treated group, the 24 h mean of the maximum temperature was significantly higher during the post-vaccination period compared with the 24 h period before vaccination. Increased temperature in the vaccinated animals occurred from ~3 h, peaked at ~10 h, and remained elevated for up to 20 h post-vaccination. In Study B, the effect of prevalence was tested in terms of the difference in maximum temperature between control and vaccination days. A thermal response to vaccination was detected in a pen of 24 to 26 animals when <10% of the animals were vaccinated. The results support the concept of radiated temperature measurements of groups of animals by IRT as a screening tool for febrile diseases in pig barns.

Implementation of machine vision for detecting behaviour of cattle and pigs

“…Other than behaviour detection, which will be addressed later in this article, examples include teat position detection for dairy cows, based on colour and morphology features, in robotic milking (Bull et al, 1996;Zwertvaegher et al, 2011) and milk yield estimation based on rear view depth, width and area of udder (Ozkaya, 2015). Furthermore, heat tolerance in pigs, based on surface temperature of group housed pigs, was monitored by Cook et al, 2015).…”

Use of modern information technologies in pigs reproduction

“…Визначенню клінічного стану новонароджених поросят присвячено багато праць (Cook, Chabot, Lui, Bench, & Schaefer, 2015). Існує комп'ютерна програма оцінки клінічного стану та потенціалу розвитку новонароджених поросят (Koshevoyi et al, 2008).…”

Early detection of health and welfare compromises through automated detection of behavioural changes in pigs

“…Cohesive or clustering behaviour may also be displayed to maintain thermal comfort from pyrexia (Cook et al., 2015) or environmental conditions (Costa et al., 2014). Low ambient temperature causes pigs to huddle for mutual heat and reduce heat loss (National Research Council, 1981), while high ambient temperature influences lying behaviour with pigs spreading out (Jackson and Cockcroft, 2007a).…”

“…Non-invasive measurement of surface temperature of pigs from infrared video (McManus et al., 2016) has supported the evaluation of automated assessment of thermal comfort measured from the spatial distribution of pigs (Cook et al., 2015). Measuring temperature non-invasively, such as with infrared cameras, can improve welfare by reducing stress from restraining animals (Soerensen and Pedersen, 2015).…”

“…The number of pigs in a cluster or huddle of pigs provides a measure of spatial distribution that demonstrated increased clustering or huddling in vaccinated pigs (Cook et al., 2015), and changes in pig lying behaviours under different environmental temperatures (Nasirahmadi et al., 2015). …”