ABSTRACT
Automatic detection of pig wasting diseases is an important issue in the management of group-housed pigs. Further, respiratory diseases are one of the main causes of mortality among pigs and loss of productivity in intensive pig farming. In this study, we propose an efficient data mining solution for the detection and recognition of pig wasting diseases using sound data in audio surveillance systems. In this method, we extract the Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCC) from sound data with an automatic pig sound acquisition process, and use a hierarchical two-level structure: the Support Vector Data Description (SVDD) and the Sparse Representation Classifier (SRC) as an early anomaly detector and a respiratory disease classifier, respectively. Our experimental results show that this new method can be used to detect pig wasting diseases both economically (even a cheap microphone can be used) and accurately (94% detection and 91% classification accuracy), either as a standalone solution or to complement known methods to obtain a more accurate solution.
Subject(s)
Auscultation/methods , Pattern Recognition, Automated/methods , Population Surveillance/methods , Porcine Postweaning Multisystemic Wasting Syndrome/diagnosis , Porcine Postweaning Multisystemic Wasting Syndrome/physiopathology , Respiratory Sounds/physiopathology , Sound Spectrography/methods , Animals , Auscultation/instrumentation , Reproducibility of Results , Sensitivity and Specificity , Sound Spectrography/instrumentation , Support Vector Machine , SwineABSTRACT
Epicutaneously administered chemical antigens like 2,4-dinitrofluorobenzene (DNFB), evoke an atopic dermatitis (AD)-like dermatitis reaction in NC/Nga mice under specific pathogen free (SPF) conditions. Astragalus membranaceus (AM), is a popular herbal medicine used to treat allergic diseases in East Asia. In the present study, we examined whether AM suppress AD-like skin lesions in NC/Nga mice treated with DNFB under SPF conditions. Oral administration of AM to DNFB-treated NC/Nga mice was found to inhibit ear thickness increases and the skin lesions induced by DNFB. Moreover, IFN-gamma production by CD4(+) T cells from the lymph nodes of DNFB-treated NC/Nga mice was significantly inhibited by AM treatment, although levels of IL-4 and total IgE in serum were not. Study findings suggest that AM may suppress the development of AD-like dermatitis in DNFB-treated NC/Nga mice by reducing IFN-gamma production.
