Assessing the composition of the soft tissue in lamb carcasses with bioimpedance and accessory measures

Consumers are demanding additional information to support their decision-making while shopping for meat. In the lamb industry, labelling carcasses with composition information is challenging. This is due to issues with conventional analytical procedures, such as the time spent with determinations and product loss or devaluing due to sampling for analysis. The objective was to evaluate the potential use of bioimpedance analysis (BIA) to determine composition of the soft tissue portion of lamb carcasses. Thirty-one Texel and Ile-de-France crossbreed ram lambs were slaughtered at 20, 26, 32, or 38 kg of body weight. Values of resistance and reactance were collected from hot and cold carcasses, which weighed 12.4 ± 2.99 kg and 11.9 ± 2.94 kg, respectively and measured 53.9 ± 3.25 cm of length. Carcass weight and length were used to calculate other BIA variables such as impedance modulus, phase angle, bioelectrical volume, and both resistive and reactive densities. These variables were used as independent variables to predict the contents of soft tissue, moisture, ash, protein, fat, lean, and crude energy of the carcasses. Multiple regression analyses were carried out to calibrate BIA models. The leave-one-out cross-validation was performed to evaluate precision and accuracy of the BIA technique. Resistive density was the most important BIA variable to predict lamb composition of hot carcasses, which explained 83% to 92% of the variation in composition. In turn, reactive density better predicted lamb carcass composition in cold carcasses, which accounted for 81% to 92% of their variation in carcass composition. In addition, prediction models of the soft tissue portion of lamb carcasses assessed on cold carcasses showed a higher coefficient of determination and smaller root mean square error and Mallows Cp values than hot carcasses. Therefore, BIA has an excellent potential to predict lamb carcass components on either hot as cold carcass; however, higher accuracy was found with cold carcasses in comparison with hot.