Neural Network-Aided Milk Somatic Cell Count Increase Prediction

Subclinical mastitis (SM) is the most economically damaging yet often visually undetectable disease of dairy cows. Early detection and treatment can reduce the loss caused by the disease; thus, the continuous improvement of SM diagnostic methods is necessary. Although milk's somatic cell count (SCC) is commonly measured for diagnostic purposes, its direct determination is not widely used in everyday practice. The primary objective of our work was to investigate whether the predictive value of SM diagnostics can be improved by training artificial neural networks (ANNs) on data generated using typical conventional milking systems. The best ANN classifier had a sensitivity of 0.54 and a specificity of 0.77, which is comparable to performances of various California Mastitis Tests (CMT) found in the literature. Combining two diagnostic tests, ANN and CMT, we concluded that the positive predictive value could be up to 50% higher than the value provided by the individual CMT. While implementing CMT is a labor-intensive process on herd-level, in milking machines where milk properties or milk yield data can be measured automatically, similar to our work, SCC-increase predictions for all individuals could be obtained daily basis.