Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 4, 2025
Noninvasive, In-pen Approach Test for Laboratory-housed Pigs
Published on: June 5, 2019
Evaluating remote post-mortem veterinary meat inspections on pig carcasses using pre-recorded video material
Viktor Almqvist1, Charlotte Berg2, Arja Helena Kautto3
1Department of Biomedical Sciences and Veterinary Public Health, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, P.O. Box 7036, Uppsala, 750 07, Sweden. viktor.almqvist@slu.se.
Background:
Official meat inspections at small-scale slaughterhouses and game-handling establishments in geographically remote areas place a heavy burden on the meat-producing food business operators. By performing meat inspections remotely using live-streamed video, instead of on-site, the official control could meet the goals of sustainability, resilience and logistics. We investigated the agreement between the two approaches at pig slaughter. Two official veterinarians (OVs) inspected 400 pig carcasses at a Swedish slaughterhouse, with each pig being inspected on site by one OV and remotely by the other. After a period of 3 to 6 months, video recordings of the remote inspections were assessed again by the same OVs, thus enabling direct comparisons of previous on-site inspections and renewed video-based inspections within the same OV.
Results:
Agreement across 22 finding codes was generally very high for both OVs. In all but one case (whether to fully condemn a carcass), for both OVs, Prevalence-Adjusted Bias-Adjusted kappa was well above 0.8, indicating 'almost perfect agreement'.
Conclusions:
This study supports earlier findings that reliable post-mortem inspections can be performed using video, and indicates higher agreement between remote and on-site inspections if the same OV performs both.
