An imagery system for measuring the major constituents from the 6th rib of bovines
L’imagerie appliquée a la mesure de composition en tissus de la 6ème côte du bovin
Abstract
The meat industry, consumers, and researchers on muscle science, are interested in rapid, non-destructive and precise instruments to characterise the entire beef carcass or a simple piece of meat. Imaging techniques are able to separate and quantify major constituents of interest, such as muscle and fat. In this paper we describe a new device allowing visible and fluorescent imaging of a cross section of the 6th rib in association with an algorithm of virtual dissection. This software calculates the area of tissues (different muscles, intramuscular and intermuscular fat, bone, etc) and the percent of their spatial occupation (e.g. marbling). We analysed samples from 29 young bulls and this demonstrated that our tool and the measuring method was reproducible, being potentially more interesting than the real dissection (weight) and finally able to predict overall carcass adipose tissues.