X-ray computed tomography accurately assesses beef carcass composition

X-ray computed tomography (CT) scanning of live animals and carcasses provides a very accurate assessment of the weights of fat, muscle and bone in pigs (Dobrowolski et al., 2003) and sheep (Johansen et al., 2007). Although the limiting size of the CT gantry prevents CT scanning of live beef cattle, beef primal joints are small enough to be scanned. Navajas et al. (2008) explored the use of spiral CT scanning (SCTS) to quantify beef carcass composition. The automatic image analysis developed provided very accurate assessments of primal and carcass composition (Navajas et al, 2008). The objective of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of this novel method for assessing beef primal cut and carcass composition in an independent dataset.