Investigation into thoracic asymmetry in ridden horses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Progressive training of horses focusses on the muscular development and flexibility to both the right and the left. However anecdotal evidence suggests that horses are not symmetrically structured through the thoracic region and this may have effects on saddle fitting and performance. The aim of this research was to determine if asymmetry exists in the thoracic musculoskeletal structure of ridden horses by analysing retrospective data of saddle fits (n=490) obtained from a saddle fitting company. A flexible wither tracer tool was used to obtain tracings of wither shape. Each tracing yielded four repeatable points (two on the left; two on the right) measured from the midline at the highest and lowest points of the withers. Descriptive assessments of shoulder, wither, and back shape, and demographic information on both horse and rider were recorded. A Wilcoxon signed-rank test compared the means of the wither shape measurements. A GLIMMIX procedure identified relationships between the wither measurements, descriptive assessments, and horse and rider demographics. The means of measurements from the wither tracer tool showed almost 60% of horses having larger measurements on the left side (P<0.0001). There was no effect of horse breed, age, sex, height or level of training on wither measurements (P>0.05). Rider age, gender, height, weight and level of training did not affect wither measurements (P>0.05). These results show that horses are asymmetric in their thoracic structure with a majority of horses larger on their left side than the right. This asymmetry may be due to genetics, environment or training and should be considered when fitting a saddle to the horse.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".