Keel fracture assessment of laying hens by palpation: inter‐observer reliability and accuracy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The objective of this study was to assess the interobserver reliability (agreement) and accuracy of keel palpation for the purpose of detecting old fractures in an end-of-lay flock of commercial laying hens. The low level of invasiveness and the relative speed at which this evaluation can be carried out lends itself well to use in a welfare audit, but only if the results are reliable and accurate from various assessors. The palpation technique first described by Wilkins and others (2004) was used to manually palpate for keel fractures. The technique was modified in that only keel fractures were considered. Eight assessors with varying laying hen experience palpated 100 live ISA Brown hens that had been in lay for 49 weeks. The hens were then euthanased and examined by dissection to establish whether there had been a keel fracture present (yes/no). The accuracy for individual assessors ranged from 87.1 to 96.8 per cent, with a mean of 91.8 per cent among all eight assessors. The interobserver reliability among all eight assessors was moderate (κ=0.44). Accuracy and κ values were 84.8 per cent and 0.41 for the first 50 hens, and 99.5 per cent and 0.47 for the last 50 hens, respectively, indicating that there was increased accuracy and agreement as the assessors became more experienced at palpation. This level of agreement, and the high level of accuracy, would make this technique an acceptable measure of keel fracture prevalence in a welfare audit.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".