| 1. |
- Ask, Katrina, et al.
(författare)
-
Kinematic gait characteristics of straight line walk in clinically sound dairy cows
- 2021
-
Ingår i: PLoS ONE. - : Public Library of Science (PLoS). - 1932-6203. ; 16
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The aim of this study is to describe the kinematic gait characteristics of straight line walk in clinically sound dairy cows using body mounted Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) at multiple anatomical locations. The temporal parameters used are speed and non-speed normalized stance duration, bipedal and tripedal support durations, maximal protraction and retraction angles of the distal limbs and vertical displacement curves of the upper body. Gait analysis was performed by letting 17 dairy cows walk in a straight line at their own chosen pace while equipped with IMU sensors on tubera sacrale, left and right tuber coxae (LTC and RTC), back, withers, head, neck and all four lower limbs. Data intervals with stride by stride regularity were selected based on video data. For temporal parameters, the median was calculated and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were estimated based on linear mixed model (LMM) analysis, while for limb and vertical displacement curves, the median and most typical curves were calculated. The temporal parameters and distal limb angles showed consistent results with low variance and LMM analysis showed non-overlapping CI for all temporal parameters. The distal limb angle curves showed a larger and steeper retraction angle range for the distal front limbs compared with the hind limbs. The vertical displacement curves of the sacrum, withers, LTC and RTC showed a consistent sinusoidal pattern while the head, back and collar curves were less consistent and showed more variation between and within cows. This kinematic description might allow to objectively differentiate between normal and lame gait in the future and determine the best anatomical location for sensor attachment for lameness detection purposes.
|
|
| 2. |
- Ask, Katrina, et al.
(författare)
-
Performance of four equine pain scales and their association to movement asymmetry in horses with induced orthopedic pain
- 2022
-
Ingår i: Frontiers in Veterinary Science. - : Frontiers Media SA. - 2297-1769. ; 9
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Objective: This study investigated the relationship between orthopedic pain experienced at rest, and degree of movement asymmetry during trot in horses with induced reversible acute arthritis. Orthopedic pain was assessed with the Horse Grimace Scale (HGS), the Equine Utrecht University Scale of Facial Assessment of Pain (EQUUS-FAP), the Equine Pain Scale (EPS), and the Composite Orthopedic Pain Scale (CPS). Reliability and diagnostic accuracy were evaluated with intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) and area under the curve (AUC).Study design and animals: Eight healthy horses were included in this experimental study, with each horse acting as its own control.Methods: Orthopedic pain was induced by intra-articular lipopolysaccharide (LPS) administration. Serial pain assessments were performed before induction and during pain progression and regression, where three observers independently and simultaneously assessed pain at rest with the four scales. Movement asymmetry was measured once before induction and a minimum of four times after induction, using objective gait analysis.Results: On average 6.6 (standard deviation 1.2) objective gait analyses and 12.1 (2.4) pain assessments were performed per horse. The ICC for each scale was 0.75 (CPS), 0.65 (EPS), 0.52 (HGS), and 0.43 (EQUUS-FAP). Total pain scores of all scales were significantly associated with an increase in movement asymmetry (R2 values ranging from −0.0649 to 0.493); with CPS pain scores being most closely associated with movement asymmetry. AUC varied between scales and observers, and CPS was the only scale where all observers had a good diagnostic accuracy (AUC > 0.72).Conclusions and clinical relevance: This study identified significant associations between pain experienced at rest and degree of movement asymmetry for all scales. Pain scores obtained using CPS were most closely associated with movement asymmetry. CPS was also the most accurate and reliable pain scale. All scales had varying linear and non-linear relations between total pain scores and movement asymmetry, illustrating challenges with orthopedic pain assessment during rest in subtly lame horses since movement asymmetry needs to be rather high before total pain score increase.
|
|
| 3. |
- Bengtsdotter, Emma, et al.
(författare)
-
Neuromas at the castration site in geldings
- 2019
-
Ingår i: Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0044-605X .- 1751-0147. ; 61
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background Inguinal pain, unexplained hind limb lameness, back pain or behavioural problems in geldings could be attributable to painful neuromas that develop as a consequence of crushing and severing the testicular nerves during castration. The presence of neuroma in this anatomical location has never been reported, hence the knowledge of possible clinical relevance is limited. The aim of this study was to histologically investigate the testicular nerves at the castration site in geldings for the presence of neuromas. Proximal spermatic cord remnants were collected from 20 geldings admitted to routine post mortem examination for various reasons. The time of castration was unknown, but it had not been performed during the last year. Spermatic cord specimens were immersed in 10% formalin, trimmed, dehydrated, embedded in paraffin, sectioned and stained with haematoxylin and eosin (HE) for light microscopy. Identification of nerve tissue was done by immuno-localization of nerve specific enolase (NSE). Results Neuromas were found in 21 spermatic cords from 13 geldings and were bilateral in eight of the horses. The neuromas consisted of areas with small groups of non-neoplastic proliferations of peripheral neural tissue. The tissue included neurofilaments and Schwann cells, intermingled or surrounded with, epineural, perineural and endoneural fibrous tissue. The neural tissue immunostained positive with NSE. Conclusions This study showed neuromas of the remnant testicular nerves at the site of castration. Further studies are required to establish if these neuromas in the castration site are painful and if certain castration methods promote their formation. Future studies should also investigate the clinical consequence of these neuromas for the individual horse.
|
|
| 4. |
- Broomé, Sofia, et al.
(författare)
-
Dynamics are important for the recognition of equine pain in video
- 2019
-
Ingår i: Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. - : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). - 1063-6919.
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- A prerequisite to successfully alleviate pain in animals is to recognize it, which is a great challenge in non-verbal species. Furthermore, prey animals such as horses tend to hide their pain. In this study, we propose a deep recurrent two-stream architecture for the task of distinguishing pain from non-pain in videos of horses. Different models are evaluated on a unique dataset showing horses under controlled trials with moderate pain induction, which has been presented in earlier work. Sequential models are experimentally compared to single-frame models, showing the importance of the temporal dimension of the data, and are benchmarked against a veterinary expert classification of the data. We additionally perform baseline comparisons with generalized versions of state-of-the-art human pain recognition methods. While equine pain detection in machine learning is a novel field, our results surpass veterinary expert performance and outperform pain detection results reported for other larger non-human species.
|
|
| 5. |
- Broomé, Sara, et al.
(författare)
-
Going Deeper than Tracking : A Survey of Computer-Vision Based Recognition of Animal Pain and Emotions
- 2023
-
Ingår i: International Journal of Computer Vision. - : Springer Nature. - 0920-5691 .- 1573-1405. ; 131:2, s. 572-590
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Advances in animal motion tracking and pose recognition have been a game changer in the study of animal behavior. Recently, an increasing number of works go ‘deeper’ than tracking, and address automated recognition of animals’ internal states such as emotions and pain with the aim of improving animal welfare, making this a timely moment for a systematization of the field. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of computer vision-based research on recognition of pain and emotional states in animals, addressing both facial and bodily behavior analysis. We summarize the efforts that have been presented so far within this topic—classifying them across different dimensions, highlight challenges and research gaps, and provide best practice recommendations for advancing the field, and some future directions for research.
|
|
| 6. |
- Broomé, Sofia, et al.
(författare)
-
Sharing pain : Using pain domain transfer for video recognition of low grade orthopedic pain in horses
- 2022
-
Ingår i: PLOS ONE. - : Public Library of Science (PLoS). - 1932-6203. ; 17:3, s. e0263854-
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Orthopedic disorders are common among horses, often leading to euthanasia, which often could have been avoided with earlier detection. These conditions often create varying degrees of subtle long-term pain. It is challenging to train a visual pain recognition method with video data depicting such pain, since the resulting pain behavior also is subtle, sparsely appearing, and varying, making it challenging for even an expert human labeller to provide accurate ground-truth for the data. We show that a model trained solely on a dataset of horses with acute experimental pain (where labeling is less ambiguous) can aid recognition of the more subtle displays of orthopedic pain. Moreover, we present a human expert baseline for the problem, as well as an extensive empirical study of various domain transfer methods and of what is detected by the pain recognition method trained on clean experimental pain in the orthopedic dataset. Finally, this is accompanied with a discussion around the challenges posed by real-world animal behavior datasets and how best practices can be established for similar fine-grained action recognition tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/sofiabroome/painface-recognition.
|
|
| 7. |
- Egenvall, Agneta, et al.
(författare)
-
Prices for veterinary care of dogs, cats and horses in selected countries in Europe
- 2024
-
Ingår i: Frontiers in Veterinary Science. - 2297-1769. ; 11
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Introduction: In recent years, prices for veterinary care have received considerable attention in mainstream media, yet scientific literature has not delved into actual figures. This study aims to elucidate veterinary care costs for dogs, cats, and horses across five countries [Sweden (SE), Norway (NO), Denmark (DK), United Kingdom (UK), and Ireland (IR, with limited data)] through web searches.Methods: Utilising online business directories, we located URLs featuring veterinary care prices in autumn 2022, and repeated tri-monthly five times. Vetpris.se (VP), a price comparison site for SE, NO, and DK, emerged from the search. Additionally, we sought to compare price data from veterinary clinics (ranging from animal hospitals to small private clinics) using a similar approach to VP. We targeted elective procedures (e.g., gonadectomy, GDY) and common procedures (e.g., pyometra surgery in dogs).Results: Comparing data from the same clinics’ websites and from VP within extraction from autumn 2022 to winter 2023/2024, median prices for dog and cat GDY were largely consistent. By October 2023, median prices for male cat GDY ranged from €72 (SE) to €230 (DK), and €130 (SE) to €361 (DK) for females; for dog GDY from €390 (SE) to €599 (DK) for males, and €461 (UK) to €1015 (DK) for females. Across sources, median prices for cat and dog GDY increased by 2–24% over a year for procedures with at least 10 clinics per extraction. Equine GDY (per sedation and local analgaesia) in SE saw a 64% increase by year-end, with a median price of €492. Emergency surgeries during regular-hours (e.g., pyometra and caesarean section) in SE were approximately €2,300 at the last extraction, marking a 27% increase for pyometra surgery during regular-hours and 15% after-hours compared to the previous year. Variability existed within and across countries and diagnoses/procedures.Discussion: Cross-validation suggested VP generally provided reliable information, though data points for emergencies were limited. Our web searching tool necessitated extensive manual verification, indicating room for further development. We recommend enhancing price transparency for animal owners to become better informed about the cost of veterinary care and be able to make informed choices.
|
|
| 8. |
|
|
| 9. |
- Haubro Andersen, Pia
(författare)
-
A Grain-Based SARA Challenge Affects the Composition of Epimural and Mucosa-Associated Bacterial Communities throughout the Digestive Tract of Dairy Cows
- 2021
-
Ingår i: Animals. - : MDPI AG. - 2076-2615. ; 11
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Simple Summary High-yielding dairy cows must receive high-grain diets in order to meet their high energy requirements. However, these diets depress the pH in the rumen, leading to a condition referred to as subacute ruminal acidosis (SARA), and in the large intestine, and may negatively affect the taxonomic composition and the functionality of the populations of microorganisms in the digestive tract. As cows depend on these microorganisms for nutrient utilization and health, disruptions of their composition and functionality can greatly affect the production, health, and welfare of dairy cows. In our study, SARA was induced experimentally by excessive grain feeding. The taxonomic composition of bacterial populations attached to the epithelia of the digestive tract were determined throughout this tract. Our results show that SARA affected the populations of several taxa of bacteria, which suggests that the beneficial effects of these bacteria may be reduced, and that the digestive tract may be at increased risk of invasion by pathogenic microorganisms. The greatest effects of SARA on the taxonomic composition of bacteria on epithelia were in the rumen and large intestine. Their composition on epithelia in the small intestine was also affected, but the affected groups of bacteria differed from those in the rumen and large intestine. The effects of a subacute ruminal acidosis (SARA) challenge on the composition of epimural and mucosa-associated bacterial communities throughout the digestive tract were determined in eight non-lactating Holstein cows. Treatments included feeding a control diet containing 19.6% dry matter (DM) starch and a SARA-challenge diet containing 33.3% DM starch for two days after a 4-day grain step-up. Subsequently, epithelial samples from the rumen and mucosa samples from the duodenum, proximal, middle and distal jejunum, ileum, cecum and colon were collected. Extracted DNA from these samples were analyzed using MiSeq Illumina sequencing of the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene. Distinct clustering patterns for each diet existed for all sites. The SARA challenge decreased microbial diversity at all sites, with the exception of the middle jejunum. The SARA challenge also affected the relative abundances of several major phyla and genera at all sites but the magnitude of these effects differed among sites. In the rumen and colon, the largest effects were an increase in the relative abundance of Firmicutes and a reduction of Bacteroidetes. In the small intestine, the largest effect was an increase in the relative abundance of Actinobacteria. The grain-based SARA challenge conducted in this study did not only affect the composition and cause dysbiosis of epimural microbiota in the rumen, it also affected the mucosa-associated microbiota in the intestines. To assess the extent of this dysbiosis, its effects on the functionality of these microbiota must be determined in future.
|
|
| 10. |
- Haubro Andersen, Pia
(författare)
-
Accuracy and precision of oscillometric blood pressure in standing conscious horses
- 2016
-
Ingår i: Journal of Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care. - : Wiley. - 1479-3261 .- 1476-4431. ; 26, s. 85-92
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background - Arterial blood pressure (BP) is a relevant clinical parameter that can be measured in standing conscious horses to assess tissue perfusion or pain. However, there are no validated oscillometric noninvasive blood pressure (NIBP) devices for use in horses.Animals - Seven healthy horses from a teaching and research herd.Hypothesis/Objective - To evaluate the accuracy and precision of systolic arterial pressure (SAP), diastolic arterial pressure (DAP), and mean arterial pressure (MAP) in conscious horses obtained with an oscillometric NIBP device when compared to invasively measured arterial BP.Methods - An arterial catheter was placed in the facial or transverse facial artery and connected to a pressure transducer. A cuff for NIBP was placed around the tail base. The BP was recorded during normotension, dobutamine-induced hypertension, and subnormal BP induced by acepromazine administration. Agreement analysis with replicate measures was utilized to calculate bias (accuracy) and standard deviation (SD) of bias (precision).Results - A total of 252 pairs of invasive arterial BP and NIBP measurements were analyzed. Compared to the direct BP measures, the NIBP MAP had an accuracy of -4 mm Hg and precision of 10 mm Hg. SAP had an accuracy of -8 mm Hg and a precision of 17 mm Hg and DAP had an accuracy of -7 mm Hg and a precision of 14 mm Hg.Conclusions and Clinical Relevance - MAP from the evaluated NIBP monitor is accurate and precise in the adult horse across a range of BP, with higher variability during subnormal BP. MAP but not SAP or DAP can be used for clinical decision making in the conscious horse.
|
|
