| Sumario: |
One of the main purposes of meat inspection is to prevent
and detect public health hazards, such as foodborne
pathogens or chemical contaminants in meat. Furthermore,
the information obtained from slaughter animals allows
for the planning of animal health management
programmes and monitoring the effectiveness of disease
treatment and prevention strategies (1, 2). There is a
consensus in recognizing that traditional meat inspection
is no longer able to address the hazards related to meat
consumption. For these reasons, legislations all over the
world are changing meat inspection techniques, moving
towards visual-only techniques. The visual-only
inspection has showed greater efficiency than the
traditional inspection in detecting lesions. However, many
countries still do not have data on possible applications of
a visual inspection system in pigs, moreover consistent
data on post-mortem lesions for pigs in the slaughterhouse
is missing. There is also great difficulty in the criteria for
condemnation of organs or carcass (4, 5). Therefore, the
objective of the present study was to develop a software
designed to recognize, classify and quantify the main
diseases and macroscopic lesions that attack the pigs of
age to slaughter in the post-mortem inspection stage.
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