Optimization and comparison of models for core temperature prediction of mother rabbits using infrared thermography

Abstract

Core temperature is a measurement used to evaluate and diagnose the health status of mother rabbits. The preferred method is to use an indwelling probe to measure the rectal temperature. This procedure can be stressful to rabbits, are time and labor-consuming. The objective of this paper was to develop the fastest, accurate and non-invasive method to measure the rectal temperature of mother rabbits using Infrared thermography (IRT) and machine learning (ML). Two hundred lactating mother rabbits (LR) and two hundred non-lactating mother rabbits (NLR) of the YPLU breed were used in the experiment and IRT data, rectal temperature and ambient temperature were recorded. The results showed that there was a significant correlation between the maximum infrared temperature of eyes (EMIT) and ears (RMIT) and rectal temperature (p < 0.05) and a significant correlation between the EMIT, RMIT and the ambient temperature (p < 0.01) in two kinds of mother rabbits. Least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM), Gaussian process (GP), and partial least squares (PLS) machine learning methods were used to establish models of mother rabbits’ core temperature. Using the over-sampling method to process the training set, three models of LS-SVM, GP, and PLS with improved generalization performance were obtained. The RMSE for the test set by LS-SVM, GP, and PLS methods were 0.13℃, 0.12℃ and 0.07℃ and the R2 were 0.94, 0.96 and 0.98, respectively. Compared with the results obtained from two other regressions, LS-SVM and GP, the PLS method exhibited the best performance. The prediction error of the test set is <0.2℃, which can better predict the core temperature of the mother rabbits.