It has been shown that between 20 and 50% of boars completing performance tests are rejected as breeding animals because of LW problems [ 1].
Handling, scanning and image analysis for one potential breeding boar or gilt under performance testing takes, in the meantime, only about 15 min. Image analysis is fully automated using MatLab® (The MathWorks Inc., Natick, MA, USA) procedures, especially adapted to CT volume information.
As far as we are aware, this is the first study to investigate the efficacy of the Improvac in mature (adult) boars and their reproductive performance.
Our study showed that active immunization against GnRH has a negative impact on reproductive performance of the boars, as it lowers testosterone concentration in boar blood serum, libido, and volume of ejaculate and increases the number of normal spermatozoa in ejaculate.
In addition, no other symptoms have been detected in SA boars and no problems in reproductive performance in sows have been reported indicating that the SA defect affects only male fertility.
ALBPS proved to obtain better performance than ALBP when assessing boar sperm vitality, plus it allowed to use a support vector machine (SVM) classifier, improving computational time with respect to the 1×1 matching algorithm proposed in ALBP.
Stimulus dimensions were not found to be important and nor was the pig's sex, with boars and sows reaching the same level of performance.
A total of 966 F2 animals originating from crosses between Meishan (M), Pietrain (P) and European wild boar (W) were analysed for traits related to fat performance (11), enzymatic activity (9) and number and volume of fat cells (20).
In addition, the boars had only observations through their daughters', sisters' and mothers' performance.
Thus, the sow's (or boar's) deregressed EBV contained only the information on own and progeny performance.
