The effect on mouse immune systems of cow's colostrum produced 6 to 7 days after parturition

Five-week-old male mice were divided into 2 groups in which they were orally given sterile saline solution (control solution) or cow's colostrum powder prepared from milk produced 6 to 7 days after parturition in sterile saline solution (colostrum solution). The mice were given the solution once a day for 5 weeks. The level of intestinal total IgG was significantly lower in the mice given the colostrum solution than in the mice given the control solution, and the intestinal IgA and serum IgG levels tended to be lower in the mice given the colostrum solution. The numbers of spleen CD11b(+), CD19(+), and IFN-gamma(+)CD4(+) cells were also significantly lower in mice given the colostrum solution. DNA microarray analysis of mRNAs extracted from Peyer's patch cells showed that the gene expression of proteins relating to T cell activation of acquired immune responses or Fc epsilon-mediated mast cell activation was obviously lower in the mice given the colostrum solution than in the mice given the control solution, whereas that of proteins relating to T regulatory cells or intestinal innate immune system was noticeably higher in mice given the colostrum solution. These results suggest that the oral ingestion of cow's colostrum suppresses the acquired immune system and type I allergic reactions, and enhances the innate immune system.ArticleMILCHWISSENSCHAFT-MILK SCIENCE INTERNATIONAL. 65(1):11-15 (2010)journal articl

Grading the Severity of Arteriolosclerosis from Retinal Arterio-venous Crossing Patterns

The status of retinal arteriovenous crossing is of great significance for clinical evaluation of arteriolosclerosis and systemic hypertension. As an ophthalmology diagnostic criteria, Scheie's classification has been used to grade the severity of arteriolosclerosis. In this paper, we propose a deep learning approach to support the diagnosis process, which, to the best of our knowledge, is one of the earliest attempts in medical imaging. The proposed pipeline is three-fold. First, we adopt segmentation and classification models to automatically obtain vessels in a retinal image with the corresponding artery/vein labels and find candidate arteriovenous crossing points. Second, we use a classification model to validate the true crossing point. At last, the grade of severity for the vessel crossings is classified. To better address the problem of label ambiguity and imbalanced label distribution, we propose a new model, named multi-diagnosis team network (MDTNet), in which the sub-models with different structures or different loss functions provide different decisions. MDTNet unifies these diverse theories to give the final decision with high accuracy. Our severity grading method was able to validate crossing points with precision and recall of 96.3% and 96.3%, respectively. Among correctly detected crossing points, the kappa value for the agreement between the grading by a retina specialist and the estimated score was 0.85, with an accuracy of 0.92. The numerical results demonstrate that our method can achieve a good performance in both arteriovenous crossing validation and severity grading tasks. By the proposed models, we could build a pipeline reproducing retina specialist's subjective grading without feature extractions. The code is available for reproducibility

Ionization States and Plasma Structures of Mixed-morphology SNRs Observed with ASCA

We present the results of a systematic study using ASCA of the ionization state for six ``mixed-morphology'' supernova emnants (MMSNRs): IC 443, W49B, W28, W44, 3C391, and Kes 27. MMSNRs show centrally filled thermal X-ray emission, which contrasts to shell-like radio morphology, a set of haracteristics at odds with the standard model of SNR evolution (e.g., the Sedov model). We have therefore studied the evolution of the MMSNRs from the ionization conditions inferred from the X-ray spectra, independent of X-ray morphology. We find highly ionized plasmas approaching ionization equilibrium in all the mmsnrs. The degree of ionization is systematically higher than the plasma usually seen in shell-like SNRs. Radial temperature gradients are also observed in five remnants, with cooler plasma toward the limb. In IC 443 and W49B, we find a plasma structure consistent with shell-like SNRs, suggesting that at least some MMSNRs have experienced similar evolution to shell-like SNRs. In addition to the results above, we have discovered an ``overionized'' ionization state in W49B, in addition to that previously found in IC 443. Thermal conduction can cause the hot interior plasma to become overionized by reducing the temperature and density gradients, leading to an interior density increase and temperature decrease. Therefore, we suggest that the ``center-filled'' X-ray morphology develops as the result of thermal conduction, and should arise in all SNRs. This is consistent with the results that MMSNRs are near collisional ionization equilibrium since the conduction timescale is roughly similar to the ionization timescale. Hence, we conclude that MMSNRs are those that have evolved over$\sim10^4$ yr. We call this phase as the ``conduction phase.''Comment: 34 pages, 20 figures, 9 tables, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa