The University of Bern will be organizing a two day training school providing lectures and practical exercises on the assessment of keel bone damage and related topics such as pain assessment. A specific purpose will be to provide training for palpation as a method to assess keel bone damage using radiographic images as a gold standard.
The Training School is organized by Sabine Gebhardt, Sabine Vögeli, and Ariane Stratmann of the Center for Proper Housing: Poultry and Rabbits in Zollikofen, Switzerland. Special lectures will be provided by: Urs Geissbühler (University of Bern, CH), Jean-Michel Hatt (University of Zurich, CH), Sophie Verrier (AO Research Institute Davos, CH), Jens Peter Christensen (University of Copenhagen, DK) and Mike Petrik (University of Guelph, CA).
The Training School will take place on August 23rd-24th, 2017. One half of the Training School is reserved for lectures on topics including:
- Prevalence, assessment, and interpreting of keel bone damage
- Use of radiography to assess keel bone fractures
- Reliability and accuracy of palpation
- Bone healing in poultry and mammals
The second half of the Training School will involve a hands-on palpation exercise with live birds and direct comparison of outcomes with radiographic images and keel dissection of the same bird. Discussion between participants will be incorporated as part of the exercise to compare palpation outcomes in an effort to improve the accuracy of the assessor.