Mastitis therapy and control - Automatic on-line detection of abnormal milk.

Automated online detection of mastitis and abnormal milk is an important subject in the dairy industry, especially because of the introduction of automatic milking systems and the growing farm sizes with consequently less labor available per cow. Demands for performance, which is expressed as sensitivity and specificity, differ for different purposes. Therefore, automatic detection systems should be evaluated separately for mastitis and abnormal milk. The use of electrical conductivity (EC) might be sufficient to produce attention lists for clinical mastitis, but will produce a large number of false alerts due to the low prevalence of clinical mastitis. The herdsman then has to interpret results and check cows manually. The use of EC is insufficient to detect and separate abnormal milk automatically. New sensors, such as color measurement, somatic cell count measurement, near-infrared sensors, and biosensors, are commercially available and show promising results in improving the detection of mastitis and abnormal milk