Building an in vivo anatomical atlas to close the phenomic gap in animal breeding

Display Omitted A pig atlas, i.e. a 3D model of a pig, was constructed based on CT scans.The major commercial cuts and major organs were identified.The atlas is useful for automatic virtual segmentation of living pigs.The atlas is expected to constitute an important tool for pig breeding. Currently, a growing gap is observed between the enormous amount of genomic information generated from genotyping and sequencing and the scale and quality of phenotypes in animal breeding. In order to fill this gap, new technologies and automated large-scale measurements are needed. Body composition is an important trait in animal breeding related to growth, feed efficiency, health, meat quality and market value of farmed animals. In vivo anatomical atlases from CT will aid large-scale and high-throughput phenotyping in order to reduce some of the gap between genotyping and phenotyping in animal breeding. We demonstrated that atlas segmentation was able to predict major parts and organs of the pig with a numerical test applied to the primal commercial cuts.