Is meat from cull cows tougher?

Meat from cull cows is traditionally sold in Australia for mincemeat, but this study examined whether there is potential to add value by identifying meat of higher quality from older cattle. Dentition and ossification score were recorded for 173 Angus cattle of known age, ranging from 26 months to 12.6 years. Longissimus and semitendinosus muscles were sampled to assess the effect of chronological age on shear force and connective tissue. Age explained variation in shear force of the semitendinosus better than in the longissimus muscle, but had little effect on shear force values per se. At 2 days postmortem, 18% of the longissimus muscles were classified as tender reaching 65% as ageing extended to 14 days. Soluble collagen was a better predictor of age than total collagen. This study shows that the current practice of routinely selling meat from culled cows as mincemeat overlooks a valuable opportunity to grade and sell a significant proportion at higher price as prime cuts.

Real-time depth of anaesthesia assessment using strong analytical signal transform technique.

This paper introduces a new method addressing depth of anaesthesia (DoA) assessment for real-time monitoring. The new method uses a combination of phase and amplitude of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals to assess the DoA level. A strong analytical signal transform is applied to extract the phase and amplitude information of the recorded EEG signals. Based on the extracted features from the EEG signal in each different frequency band, a new DoA index is developed. The proposed new DoA index is evaluated using data from adult patients in an age range from 22 to 75 years. The results show that the new DoA index is able to detect the changing pattern of EEG signals early and agree with the clinical notes of an attending anaesthetist. The results are also closely correlated with the popular BIS index. Furthermore, the proposed new DoA index is able to detect the state changes earlier than the BIS index.

EEG data compression to monitor DoA in telemedicine.

Data compression techniques have been widely used to process and transmit huge amount of EEG data in real-time and remote EEG signal processing systems. In this paper we propose a lossy compression technique, F-shift, to compress EEG signals for remote depth of Anaesthesia (DoA) monitoring. Compared with traditional wavelet compression techniques, our method not only preserves valuable clinical information with high compression ratios, but also reduces high frequency noises in EEG signals. Moreover, our method has negligible compression overheads (less than 0.1 seconds), which can greatly benefit real-time EEG signal monitoring systems. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed compression method.