Food Animal Residue Avoidance Databank (FARAD)

The national FARAD program aims to safeguard the American public by ensuring the production of safe, animal-derived human food products, such as milk, eggs, meat, honey, and more. These products must be free of violative or potentially unsafe chemical residues, including drugs, pesticides, environmental contaminants, natural toxins, and other harmful substances. Kansas State University Olathe (KSUO) will be tasked with developing interfaces for FARAD responders to access KSUO's comparative medicine databases and computational tools, as well as relevant global data. The KSUO team will focus on creating novel AI technologies applicable to food-animal production. These technologies will facilitate the collection, organization, merging, and cleaning of data, making it easier to submit queries regarding global drug clearance data, maximum residue limits (MRLs) and withdrawal periods (WDPs). The team will also research and design a full-text retrieval system to develop an information retrieval database that can be easily queried. This system will perform metadata analysis on bibliographic records in veterinary medicine, complementing the existing FARAD database. The information retrieval system will be instrumental in developing hybrid models that combine content-based and bibliometric features for machine learning applications. These applications will extract and clean data from various sources, forming an integral part of the next-generation FARAD program.