The effect of housing and methionine intake on hoof horn hemorrhages in primiparous lactating Holstein cows

This study investigated the effects of housing and nutrition on the development of hoof horn disease (as identified by the appearance of hoof horn hemorrhages) in primiparous lactating Holstein cows. The first objective was to investigate whether replacing butyl rubber mats in cubicles (free stalls) with thicker mattresses filled with chopped rubber would significantly reduce hoof horn hemorrhages, and if this reduction would so affect the level of hoof horn hemorrhages as to make it similar to that observed in primiparous cows in straw yards. The second objective was to investigate the effect of methionine supplementation for the first 13 wk of lactation on the development of such hemorrhages. This study confirmed that both sole and white line hemorrhages increase during early lactation in housed cows, although the pattern of development of white line hemorrhages is not identical to that of sole hemorrhages. Housing primiparous cows in straw yards after calving significantly reduced the development of hoof horn hemorrhages, but replacing cubicle mats with thicker mattresses had no significant effect. Providing 115% of calculated methionine requirements had no significant impact on the development of hoof horn hemorrhages.     

Thrombin Preconditioning Improves the Therapeutic Efficacy of Mesenchymal Stem Cells in Severe Intraventricular Hemorrhage Induced Neonatal Rats

Severe intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH) remains a major cause of high mortality and morbidity in extremely preterm infants. Mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) transplantation is a possible therapeutic option, and development of therapeutics with enhanced efficacy is necessary. This study investigated whether thrombin preconditioning improves the therapeutic efficacy of human Wharton’s jelly-derived MSC transplantation for severe neonatal IVH, using a rat model. Severe neonatal IVH was induced by injecting 150 μL blood into each lateral ventricle on postnatal day (P) 4 in Sprague-Dawley rats. After 2 days (P6), naïve MSCs or thrombin-preconditioned MSCs (1 × 10⁵/10 μL) were transplanted intraventricularly. After behavioral tests, brain tissues and cerebrospinal fluid of P35 rats were obtained for histological and biochemical analyses, respectively. Thrombin-preconditioned MSC transplantation significantly reduced IVH-induced ventricular dilatation on in vivo magnetic resonance imaging, which was coincident with attenuations of reactive gliosis, cell death, and the number of activated microglia and levels of inflammatory cytokines after IVH induction, compared to naïve MSC transplantation. In the behavioral tests, the sensorimotor and memory functions significantly improved after transplantation of thrombin-preconditioned MSCs, compared to naïve MSCs. Overall, thrombin preconditioning significantly improves the therapeutic potential and more effectively attenuates brain injury, including progressive ventricular dilatation, gliosis, cell death, inflammation, and neurobehavioral functional impairment, in newborn rats with induced severe IVH than does naïve MSC transplantation.     

Detection and Classification of Hemorrhages in Retinal Images

Damage of the blood vessels in retina due to diabetes is called diabetic retinopathy (DR). Hemorrhages is the first clinically visible symptoms of DR. This paper presents a new technique to extract and classify the hemorrhages in fundus images. The normal objects such as blood vessels, fovea and optic disc inside retinal images are masked to distinguish them from hemorrhages. For masking blood vessels, thresholding that separates blood vessels and background intensity followed by a new filter to extract the border of vessels based on orientations of vessels are used. For masking optic disc, the image is divided into sub-images then the brightest window with maximum variance in intensity is selected. Then the candidate dark regions are extracted based on adaptive thresholding and top-hat morphological techniques. Features are extracted from each candidate region based on ophthalmologist selection such as color and size and pattern recognition techniques such as texture and wavelet features. Three different types of Support Vector Machine (SVM), Linear SVM, Quadratic SVM and Cubic SVM classifier are applied to classify the candidate dark regions as either hemorrhages or healthy. The efficacy of the proposed method is demonstrated using the standard benchmark DIARETDB1 database and by comparing the results with methods in silico. The performance of the method is measured based on average sensitivity, specificity, F-score and accuracy. Experimental results show the Linear SVM classifier gives better results than Cubic SVM and Quadratic SVM with respect to sensitivity and accuracy and with respect to specificity Quadratic SVM gives better result as compared to other SVMs.