GILLALERT: Providing early warning for improved gill health management

Fish health and welfare continue to be one of the biggest challenges in the aquaculture industry. Just in 2023, it is estimated that 62.8 million salmon died during the sea phase. A significant portion of this can be linked to respiratory problems and diseases such as complex gill disease (CGD). CGD, a multifactorial disease, is characterized by various injuries or disorders that occur simultaneously in the gills, negatively impacting gill function.

GillAlert offers a completely new tool that enables standardized and quantitative assessment of gill health and associated respiratory capacity. With such a standardized method as a foundation, it provides the basis for comparisons between different production sites and fish groups, promoting research and guiding production strategy choices based on gill health. The measuring device will be portable and user-friendly, so it can be used anywhere by anyone—without requiring extensive training. By reducing the analysis time and the need for expertise, GillAlert facilitates more time- and cost-effective routines for monitoring fish health and welfare. The results from the analyses will further help breeders make important strategic decisions to achieve the best possible gill health, which naturally means better fish health and welfare for the fish, and for the breeder, potentially reducing economic losses due to poor gill health.

In the project, researchers along with industry partners will use special camera technology to examine the health of salmon gills. DeepX is a tool originally developed to diagnose skin cancer in human patients, based on “Optical Transfer Diagnosis (OTD)” to characterize the biological properties in human tissue. In the GillAlert project, the objective is to adapt this tool so that it can be used on salmon gills, thereby offering the industry a semi-automatic method for quantifying gill health and assessing respiratory capacity.

Main Goal
To adapt the DeepX system into a new tool, GillAlert, intended for use by breeders and other personnel along the edge of cages and tanks to continuously evaluate respiratory capacity in the gills.

Subgoals (with corresponding work packages (WPs))

1. To adapt DeepX hardware and software for use in hatcheries and sea farms (WP1).
2. To collect gill samples that are representative of various degrees and stages of disease and health (WP2).
3. To calibrate and validate equipment using collected sample material from WP1 (WP2).
4. To facilitate the introduction of this technology through knowledge dissemination and communication with industry stakeholders (WP3).