• Moderate woody chicken breast (MWB) and normal chicken breast (NB) is evaluated by monofilament needles. • Contact pressure between chicken breast fillets and monofilament needles is expressed through the needle’s buckling indentation depth. • Compared to NB, monofilament needles buckle at significantly lower indentation depths in MWB. • SVM-derived buckling indentation depth decision boundary can differentiate MWB and NB with 94.1% accuracy. The poultry industry is experiencing increasing concerns over meat quality defects associated with the rapid growth of broilers, particularly woody breast myopathy, which negatively affects texture and reduces consumer acceptance. While severe woody breast conditions are often visually detectable, moderate cases remain challenging to identify reliably and objectively using existing manual palpation approaches. To address this challenge, we developed a novel detection approach inspired by the Semmes–Weinstein monofilament examination commonly used in clinical diabetic diagnostics. A programmable indentation system was constructed to apply monofilament needles to broiler breast fillets and to identify moderate woody samples based on the elastic buckling response of the needle. Six types of monofilament needles were selected through mechanical modeling to ensure sensitivity to the contact pressure between the needle and chicken breast tissue. During testing, each needle was incrementally indented into the cranial region of the fillet, and the buckling depth was visually recorded. Two of the six needle types demonstrated satisfactory classification performance, achieving 94.1% accuracy and F1-scores above 92%. These results indicate their suitability for evaluation. This study represents the first integration of beam buckling mechanics into meat quality assessment and introduces a low-cost, objective alternative to traditional woody breast detection methods.
Zhao et al. (Sun,) studied this question.