Artificial Intelligence: How human medicine helps raise livestock

As strange as it may seem, the creation of animals that integrate the food chain has benefited from the technology used in human medicine, which means new techniques in the routine of this industry. AI (artificial intelligence) in medicine has indeed represented a large part of its growth. Now, AI is also moving to help ranchers better manage their herds.

While much of the focus of AI in the field has been, on vision and analysis , focused on internal processes, the real world of working in the field goes beyond that and can have other meanings, such as the sound emitted by animals. In human medicine, one of the first and easiest tools to use is the x-ray. That’s why radiology started using AI to look for cancers in humans.

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However, this is not an easy tool to use in livestock, although animals can be affected by serious diseases, such as lung problems. One of them, DRB (Bovine Respiratory Disease) is very contagious in cattle herds. It causes pneumonia in the calf, and this can be fatal. As with most other diseases in humans and other animals, the sooner the BRD can be identified and treated, the better.

Given that the BRD is, as the name clearly indicates a respiratory disease, researchers at Merck Animal Health, an animal health multinational, realized they could use microphones to pick up sounds and then AI to analyze those sounds for key features. As with vision, neural networks are the ideal tool for complex analysis of captured sound. As this is a new area and there are still experts who only have an idea of ​​the main features, supervised learning is what they used to train the system.

“As the The use of sound recordings for DRB is not as widespread as radiology in humans, there is no comparable large database for system training,” said Udi Cohen, PhD and head of global research and development at Merck Animal Health Intelligence Technology Labs. . “Thus, using resources calculated from the data, supervised learning makes it possible to identify elements that must be used for DRB recognition. As the dataset grows, we will always look to see what additional tools can be used.”

It works like this: as cattle pass through the work trough, in a corral for example, the current version of Whisper on Arrival, which is technology used by Merck, helps to identify calves that are likely to respond to antimicrobial therapy for bovine respiratory diseases.

Expectation is that as machine versions evolve and more diagnostics will be supported by AI and other technologies in the field , this equipment integrates with increasingly advanced processes that provide a better analysis of a wider variety of bovine body conditions.

Livestock is formed by a wide, varied and complex series of industries that are essential to sustain the large global population of animals. Tools that help manage livestock more efficiently are critical. So, when cattle care improves, these actions become even more important. Artificial intelligence is coming hard into a growing number of applications in livestock, and analysis to minimize the impact of DRB is one of the most recent.