Effect of an organochlorine insecticide, endosulfan, on blood parameters in rat

زمینه و هدف: آندوسولفان به عنوان یک حشره کش و کرم کش ارگانوکلره استفاده وسیعی در کنترل حشرات دارد. این سم در انسان ها و حیوانات از طریق خوراکی، استنشاقی و پوستی قابل جذب می باشد. این مطالعه با هدف بررسی تاثیر سم ارگانوکلره آندوسولفان بر پارامترهای خونی در موش صحرایی انجام شد. روش بررسی: در این مطالعه تجـــربی40 سر موش صحرایی به پنج گروه تقسیم شدند. گروه کنترل هیچ ماده ای دریافت نکرد، گروه دارونما سرم فیزیولوژی و گروه تجربی 1، 2 و 3 به ترتیب آندوسولفان با دوز 5، 10 و 20 میلیگرم به ازای هر کیلو گرم وزن بدن هر سه روز یکبار به مدت 21 روز از طریق گاواژ دریافت کردند. در پایان آزمایشات موشها با کلروفرم بیهوش شده، خونگیری از قلب انجام گرفت و فاکتورهای خونی با روش های استاندارد آزمایشگاهی مورد ارزیابی قرار گرفت. داده ها به کمک آزمون های آماری آنالیز واریانس یک طرفه و دانکن تجزیه و تحلیل شدند. یافته ها: تجزیه و تحلیل نتایج نشان داد، میزان گلبول های سفید و مونوسیت ها، افزایش معنی دار (05/0

Effect of hydroalcoholic Zingiber extract on creatinine and blood urea nitrogen (BUN) of mice.

چکیده: زمینه و هدف: اکثر جمعیت جهان به خصوص در کشورهای در حال توسعه، برای احتیاجات اساسی بهداشتی خود از داروهای گیاهی استفاده می کنند. زنجبیل (Zingiber officinale Roscoe) یک چاشنی غذایی می باشد که از دو هزار سال پیش به عنوان دارو در طب چینی، پزشکی سنتی ایران و طب اسلامی استفاده شده است. از آنجایی که افزایش اوره سرم و سطوح کرآتینین در آزمایش های کلینیکی بیانگر نارسایی کلیوی می باشد، این مطالعه با هدف بررسی تأثیر عصاره هیدروالکلی زنجبیل بر نیتروژن اوره خون و کرآتینین به منظور ارزیابی عملکرد کلیه انجام شد. روش بررسی: در یک مطالعه تجربی عصاره هیدروالکلی زنجبیل به صورت یک روز در میان در یک دوره 20 روزه با دوزهای 10، 20 و 40 میلی گرم بر کیلوگرم در 48 ساعت به صورت داخل صفاقی به موشهای نر آزمایشگاهی تزریق شد. سپس خونگیری با استفاده از روش پانکسیون سینوس چشمی انجام و میزان نیتروژن اوره خون (BUN) و کراتینین اندازه گیری شد. داده ها با استفاده از آزمون های آنالیز واریانس یک طرفه و کروسکال والیس تجزیه و تحلیل شد. یافته ها: میانگین غلظت BUN در گروه کنترل 89/3±68/37 و در گروههای دریافت کننده 10، 20 و 40 میلی گرم بر کیلوگرم در 48 ساعت زنجبیل به ترتیب 38/11±54/21 (05/0

Copper ion as a new leakage tracer.

STATEMENT OF PROBLEM Most failures of root canal treatments are caused by bacteria. Studies showed that the most common cause of endodontic failures were the incomplete obturation of the root canal and the lack of adequate apical seal. Some in-vitro methods are used to estimate sealing quality, generally by measuring microleakage that allows the tracer agent to penetrate the filled canal. PURPOSE Conventional methods of evaluating the seal of endodontically treated teeth are complicated and have some drawbacks. We used copper ion diffusion method to assess the leakage and the results were compared to dye penetration method. MATERIALS AND METHOD The crowns of 21 extracted teeth were cut off at the CEJ level. After preparing the canals, the teeth were placed in tubes containing saline. They were divided randomly into 15 experimental cases; 3 positive and 3 negative controls. Positive controls were filled by single cone without sealer while the experimental and the negative control groups were filled by lateral technique. The coronal portion of gutta was removed and 9mm was left. The external surface of each tooth was coated with nail polish. Two millimeters of apical portion was immersed into 9ml of distilled water and 0.3ml of CuSO4 solution was injected into the coronal portion. After 2 days, copper sulfate was measured by an atomic absorption spectrophotometer. The teeth were then immersed in 2% methylene blue for 24 hours, sectioned and the extent of dye penetration was measured by a stereomicroscope. RESULTS The maximum and minimum recorded copper ion concentrations for the experimental group were 18.37 and 2.87ppm respectively. The maximum and minimum recorded dye penetrations for the experimental group were 8.5 and 3.5mm respectively. The statistical analysis, adopting paired samples test, showed poor correlation between average recorded results of two methods. CONCLUSION Based on our results, there was no significant correlation between the dye penetration and the copper ion diffusion methods

Assessment of Antidermatophytic Activities of Urtica dioica L against Microsporum canis in a Guinea Pig Model

Purpose: To investigate the antidermatophytic effects of Urtica dioica L. against Microsporum canis in vitro and in a guinea pig model.Methods: The in vitro antifungal activity of the extracts was measured by disc diffusion method and assessment of minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC). The dorsum of the guinea pigs was infected with M. canis and topically treated as follows: negative control (NC) received no treatment; positive control (PC) received terbinafine 1 %; DMSO group (negative control) received 10 % DMSO (vehicle); while three other groups, viz, SN10%, SN20% and SN30% received 10, 20 and 30 % hydroalcohol extract dissolved in 10 % DMSO, respectively.Results: Both extracts did not show considerable antifungal activity against M. canis compared with terbinafine. The MICs of aqueous and hydroalcoholic extracts were 30 and 20 mg.ml-1, respectively. PC and SN30% groups showed normal hair growth on day 15 while their skin looked healthy on day 30 post-inoculation. Lesion severity and clinical scores declined in SN30% and PC groups in comparison to NC group, on day 30 post-inoculation. Also, on day 30 post-inoculation, the clinical efficacy of the test formulations increased to 11.76, 23.52, 76.47, 5.88, and 94.11 % for SN10%, SN20%, SN30%, DMSO10%, and PC groups, respectively.Conclusions: The hydroalcoholic extract of this plant could be further developed, with a view to its possibe use as an adjunct remedy for topical treatment of tinea corporis.Keywords: Urtica dioica L., Microsporum canis, Kurdish Ethnomedicine, Antifungal, Hair growth, Lesion, Dermatophytosis, Tinea corpori

Boosting Medical Image Segmentation Performance with Adaptive Convolution Layer

Medical image segmentation plays a vital role in various clinical applications, enabling accurate delineation and analysis of anatomical structures or pathological regions. Traditional CNNs have achieved remarkable success in this field. However, they often rely on fixed kernel sizes, which can limit their performance and adaptability in medical images where features exhibit diverse scales and configurations due to variability in equipment, target sizes, and expert interpretations. In this paper, we propose an adaptive layer placed ahead of leading deep-learning models such as UCTransNet, which dynamically adjusts the kernel size based on the local context of the input image. By adaptively capturing and fusing features at multiple scales, our approach enhances the network's ability to handle diverse anatomical structures and subtle image details, even for recently performing architectures that internally implement intra-scale modules, such as UCTransnet. Extensive experiments are conducted on benchmark medical image datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposal. It consistently outperforms traditional \glspl{CNN} with fixed kernel sizes with a similar number of parameters, achieving superior segmentation Accuracy, Dice, and IoU in popular datasets such as SegPC2021 and ISIC2018. The model and data are published in the open-source repository, ensuring transparency and reproducibility of our promising results

Meta-Decomposition: Dynamic Segmentation Approach Selection in IoT-based Activity Recognition

Internet of Things (IoT) devices generate heterogeneous data over time; and relying solely on individual data points is inadequate for accurate analysis. Segmentation is a common preprocessing step in many IoT applications, including IoT-based activity recognition, aiming to address the limitations of individual events and streamline the process. However, this step introduces at least two families of uncontrollable biases. The first is caused by the changes made by the segmentation process on the initial problem space, such as dividing the input data into 60 seconds windows. The second category of biases results from the segmentation process itself, including the fixation of the segmentation method and its parameters. To address these biases, we propose to redefine the segmentation problem as a special case of a decomposition problem, including three key components: a decomposer, resolutions, and a composer. The inclusion of the composer task in the segmentation process facilitates an assessment of the relationship between the original problem and the problem after the segmentation. Therefore, It leads to an improvement in the evaluation process and, consequently, in the selection of the appropriate segmentation method. Then, we formally introduce our novel meta-decomposition or learning-to-decompose approach. It reduces the segmentation biases by considering the segmentation as a hyperparameter to be optimized by the outer learning problem. Therefore, meta-decomposition improves the overall system performance by dynamically selecting the appropriate segmentation method without including the mentioned biases. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal

Effect of magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles on pregnancy and testicular development of mice

this study, considering the high sensitivity of developing fetal organs, different doses of iron oxide nanoparticles coated with dimercaptosuccinic acid (DMSA) were injected intraperitoneally to pregnant mice. The magnetic and structural properties of DMSA-coated nanoparticles were examined by Alternating Gradient-Force Magnetometry, X-Ray Diffraction and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy. The histological studies of the fetal liver and placenta sections showed presence of  nanoparticles in these organ systems. Weight change and the number of pups born by pregnant mice in comparison with controls were not significantly different. But, a significant decrease was seen in infants growth from the mothers treated with doses higher than 50 mg/kg. The testicular histological studies of these infants showed decrease in spermatogonia, spermatocytes, spermatids and mature sperm significantly. Although, some studies revealed the nontoxic effect of iron oxide nanoparticles in adult mice, the present study indicated that, the doses higher than 50 mg/kg of DMSA-coated magnetic nanoparticles can disrupt embryo development.Key words: Magnetic nanoparticles, pregnancy, testicular development, toxicity

Effects of dietary probiotic (Lactobacillus plantarum) on body composition, serum biochemical parameters and liver enzymes of Asian sea bass (Lates calcalifer, Bloch 1790)

In the current study, the effects of different levels of probiotics, Lactobacillus plantarum in the diet of Asian sea bass, Lates calcarifer on body composition, serum biochemical parameters (glucose, cholesterol, triglyceride and albumin) and liver enzymes (lactate dehydrogenase, alkaline phosphatase, alanine aminotransferase and aspartate aminotransferase) were investigated. This experiment was carried out with three treatments and a control group for a period of four weeks. The treatments were included 0, 1×106, 2×106, 3×106 colony forming unit (CFU) gram probiotic in each gram of basic diet. Fish with an average weight of 50.26 ±0.89 grams were randomly distributed in tanks and in each tank stocked 20 pieces of fish. Feeding was done twice a day. The obtained results indicated that the use of different levels of probiotic in diet of Asian sea bass had no significant effects on serum biochemical parameters and liver enzymes. The different levels of probiotic did not affect protein, ash and moisture values between the treatments and the control group (P> 0.05). Moreover, fat value in the fish T2 and T3 was significantly higher (P< 0.05) than the fish control and T1. Also, nitrogen free extract (NFE) value varied significantly (P < 0/05) between the control and the fish T3. Overall, this study indicated that this probiotic had no significant effect on some blood biochemical parameters and liver enzyme, but at the high level can positively influence on body composition of Asian sea bass

The effect of isolated Lactobacillus from gut of Barbus grypus on growth performance, survival and gut microflora of common carp (Cyprinus carpio)

This study evaluated the impact of dietary supplementation bacteria, Lactobacillus plantarum and Lactobacillus bulgaricus isolated from the intestine of Barbus grypus on growth performance, survival and intestinal flora of common carp. For this purpose 480 common carp (average initial weight of 40 ± 6g) were randomly divided to 4 treatments (with three replications) and fed with diet containing 5×107 CFU/g L.plantarum (Group 1), L.bulgaricus (Group 2), Lactobacillus casei (Group3) and a diet without probiotic supplementation (As control group) for 60 days. To evaluate the persistent of the bacteria in digestive system, from the 60 th day to75 th day, experimental fish were fed with diet without probiotics (control). Results showed that Specific growth rate of fish fed diets containing Lactobacillus significantly higher compared with control group (p<0.05). Fish fed diets containing L.casei had significantly lower FCR than the control group on 60 th and 75 th of trial (p<0.05). The protein efficiency ratio and specific growth rate of fish fed the isolated bacteria at different times of trial was higher compared to fish fed than control diet. In general, results of intestinal micro flora assessment showed that Lactobacillus bacteria significantly increased in fish fed with dietary probiotic at 30 and 60 of trial (p<0.05) and groups 2 and 3 showed the greatest amount of Lactobacillus compared to the control group after 30 days of feeding. Theresults of this study showed that the addition of lactobacillus bacteria isolated from the intestines of Barbus grypus in the diet of common carp increased the beneficial micro flora population of intestinal microflora and ultimately improved growth performance and feed utilization