Seafood lovers know the fatty marbling is what makes tuna sashimi and sushi so tasty. So for the industry, it is the fishโs level of fattiness that is used to judge its quality and pricing.
Usually, several people assess how fatty a tuna is by cutting the tail with a giant saw-like knife, an operation that takes about 60 seconds per fish.
But now a machine called Sonofai uses ultrasound waves to do the job in 12 seconds, operated by a person without prior knowledge of how to carve fish.
Fujitsu, the Japanese company behind the technology, recently gave a demonstration of Sonofai, a word blended from โsonoโ referring to โsoundโ, โfโ for Fujitsu and โaiโ for artificial intelligence. The name refers to its components but also stands for โson of AIโ.
A conveyor belt transports a whole frozen tuna fish, about a metre (3ft) in size, into a machine that beams ultrasound waves.
Sensors pick up the waves to draw a zigzagging diagram on a screen to indicate the fishโs fattiness.