ADAL has been awarded with two prizes during the 2020 edition of StartCup Abruzzo, one of the most important startup competition in southern Italy, which is dedicated to the promotion and acceleration of digital innovation ventures, organized by the “Camera di Commercio di Chieti Pescara” (Chamber of Trade and Industries), the “Agenzia di Sviluppo Camera di Commercio di Chieti Pescara” (the Chamber’s Development Agency) and the Abruzzo Region, in partnership with the Polytechnic University of Milan’s Poli.Hub and Innovalley.

ADAL won two prizes: the Naming Prize by the sponsor company Hiteco and the Chamber of Trade and Industry Prize.
These are two important achievements for the R&D activities that the team is carrying on both within the University of Teramo, under the lead and supervision of Professor Giuseppe Marruchella, and the AIMageLab, where researchers at the University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia work on the ADAL project.

The brave dare to invest in innovative technologies

These two prizes Farm4Trade’s ADAL obtained during the 2020 edition of StartCup Abruzzo are the result of a continuous and proficuous collaboration and coordination with institutions and companies operating in the Abruzzo Region and of a brave investment in innovation technologies, which Farm4Trade has always trusted to be the key to revolutionize the zootechnical industry.  

The ADAL project has reached such a readiness that is now catching the attention of big players on the market, spacing in different industries such as the pharmaceutical one and the institutional organizations.  

With the technology that underlies ADAL, Farm4Trade can meet multiple needs concerning the production phase, the optimization of processes and the guarantee of product’s quality on the meat supply chain. ADAL is a sanitary surveillance tool first of all, which is able to integrate and reinforce the veterinary professionals’ work, providing a technology that stands by their side to make the sanitary control more accurate and efficient.

Inspections on the carcasses of slaughtered animals, which have been performed manually until now, become more agile, accurate and automated, thanks to the installation on the slaughtering line of robots that will capture, store and analyze pictures of the animals’ organs via computer vision, to identify the kind and entity of lung lesions (pleurisy and pneumonia) with an accuracy close to 90%. This is made possible by an Artificial Intelligence system based on neural networks that can identify and classify the lesions that express a pathological condition.

The data that will be so acquired will be automatically elaborated and provided back in complete reports, that allow having a prompt and complete overlook on the results of each inspection within minutes from its performance.

All data will be stored both locally, and will be accessible in real-time, and on a dedicated cloud storage. All data can be verified, read and further evaluated or double checked remotely anytime, from anyone that has been granted the access to the platform, including third parties such as veterinarians or other stakeholders.

The adaptation of ADAL technology to other aspects and products concerning pig production is currently at a study phase. Soon there will be important news on more features that will allow tracing, certifying and guaranteeing product quality all along the food supply chain. Moreover, there will be a neat cost saving aspect for livestock breeders and meat producers, starting from the cost of the inspection itself that will shrink down to one third of its current cost, to the costs of vaccinations or medical treatments, that will hopefully decrease by optimizing their utilization after the insights provided by ADAL’s analysis on mass data coming from livestock farms and abattoirs.

An open door to the world

ADAL’s potential clearly trespasses national borders and makes this project ready for internationalization: several partnerships with some of the main industry European actors already exist.

Being awarded the StartCup Abruzzo 20202 prizes reinforces Farm4Trade’s  presence, integration and synergies in a local scenario, and poses the basis to build a winning model to open to the international market in a short time.

Thanks to the partnership with Hiteco, Farm4Trade will now have access to a know-how that will allow it to empower the aspects of operation management and of control over processes.

While the prize by the Chamber of Trade and Industry of Chieti Pescara elects Farm4Trade as a high potential venture,  able to affirm itself as a flagship entrepreneurship reality in the Abruzzo Region, an economically fragile southern Italy region, which Farm4Trade is also very proud to represent and promote.

The value of teamwork

Farm4Trade truly and deeply thanks the team members for the hard and excellent work, which they carry on with relentless constance bringing excellent quality results. Thanks again to the team, who has the courage to invest in highly innovative technologies with a disruptive potential on entire industries, which Farm4Trade is proud of. This work leads to achievements such as the StartCup Abruzzo Prizes, a success that indicates this is the right road to go down and these projects need to be brought to completion.

If you want to know more about ADAL and all of Farm4Trade Projects and Services, please contact us here.

PUBLICATIONS

For more details, consult the scientific publication published in the scientific journal “Veterinary Research”: Scoring pleurisy in slaughtered pigs using convolutional neural networks.