Beef mechanically deboned meat (MDM) DEXA based processed control

Summary

​Bone cannons allow significant amounts of protein to be recovered from waste materials from the boning room.  A means to optimise their output however does not currently exist. This project aimed to investigate the use of DEXA technology to be able to maximise yield output from the bone cannon by examining the waste product stream ('bone cake'). The system is able to identify some lean-containing portions on bone cake material, but a limitation exists whereby bone marrow, cartilage, tendon and ligament results in false positives. A number of measures may be able to improve performance, including investigating alternative hardware, sensing technologies and/or complex vision algorithms.