The effects of including CT in pig breeding programmes

The first CT for animal science research was established at our University in 1981. Many years with CT-experiments in live pigs and in carcasses have been carried through over these years. The projects of the 1980s concentrated on testing the accuracies of CT in live pigs (Allen, P. and O. Vangen, several papers 1980s). It was shown that fat was estimated with 97-99 percent accuracy, while protein/muscle content was predicted with accuracies of 90-95 percent. In the 1990’s the CT experiments in pigs were mainly at measuring maintenance requirements and growth of different body tissues in different pig breeds and breed combinations (Kolstad, K., PhD degree and several papers), showing genetic differences in maintenance requirements and that growth and mobilization of different body tissues differed between breeds.