The determination of mastitis severity at 4-level using Milk physical properties: A deep learning approach via MLP and evaluation at different SCC thresholds

• Published in: Research in veterinary science 2024-07, Vol.174, p.105310-105310, Article 105310
• Main Authors: Yesil, Muhammed Ikbal, Goncu, Serap
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Animals; Artificial neural networks (ANN); Cattle; Cell Count - veterinary; Deep Learning; Female; Mastitis, Bovine - diagnosis; Milk; Milk - chemistry; Milk - cytology; Multilayer perceptron (MLP); Neural Networks, Computer; Severity of Illness Index; Somatic cell count (SCC); Subclinical mastitis
• ISSN: 0034-5288; 1532-2661
• DOI: 10.1016/j.rvsc.2024.105310

Current research aims to generate an alternative model to classical methods in the determination of subclinical mastitis at 4 levels (healthy, suspicious, subclinical, and clinical). For this purpose, multilayer perceptron (MLP) artificial neural networks (ANN) was developed as test model. 5 variables from the physical properties of milk somatic cell count (SCC), electrical conductivity (EC), pH, density, and temperature at fore milking (TFM) were included in the model in the classification of mastitis. Model performance was validated on test data (%25) and compared with the multinomial logistic regression (MNLR). MLP model has shown a satisfactory performance with an accuracy of 95.14% and − 141 of AIC score better than the control model (MNLR) of 80.27% and − 133 AIC despite using higher number of parameters (104). Since the main problem is to diagnose subclinical mastitis, which does not cause any visible symptoms, it was important to distinguish between absolute subclinical (suspicious excluded positives) and absolute healthy (suspicious included positives) ones. Therefore, optimum cut-off threshold was evaluated for these two different scenarios with only variable SCC the gold standard indicator of subclinical mastitis and results were compared in the interpretation of model performance. The results show that the 5-variable MLP model exhibits a high sensitivity of 93.22% (AUC = 0.95 for healthy ones) at low cutoff thresholds as well. New studies should provide a better understanding by evaluating economics, sustainability, animal welfare and health aspects together to determine the optimal threshold value. •MLP was used for the classification of mastitis at 4-levels.•Results were compared with MNLR and two different thresholds via gold-standard indicator only.•The model can be used to detect subclinical cases in automated milking systems.•The TensorFlow-GPU on a CUDA-supported GPU as research material offers great convenience in terms of cost and time-saving.•When suspicious were included into negatives, almost a 14% increase in diagnosis made only through SCC is observed.