• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
• /
• v.23 no.3
• /
• pp.241-250
• /
• 2019

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the relation between quantitative magnetic resonance imaging biomarkers, and clinical performances in chronic phase of carbon monoxide intoxication. Materials and Methods: Eighteen magnetic resonance scans and cognitive evaluations were performed, on patients with carbon monoxide intoxication in chronic phase. Apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) ratios of affected versus unaffected centrum semiovale, and corpus callosum were obtained. Signal intensity (SI) ratios between affected centrum semiovale, and normal pons in T2-FLAIR (fluid-attenuated inversion recovery) images were obtained. The Mini-Mental State Exam, and clinical outcome scores were assessed. Correlation coefficients were calculated, between MRI and clinical markers. Patients were further classified into poor-outcome and good-outcome groups based on clinical performance, and imaging parameters were compared. T2-SI ratio of centrum semiovale was compared, with that of 18 sex-matched and age-matched controls. Results: T2-SI ratio of centrum semiovale was significantly higher in the poor-outcome group, than that in the good-outcome group and was strongly inversely correlated, with results from the Mini-Mental State Exam. ADC ratios of centrum semiovale were significantly lower in the poor outcome group than in the good outcome group, and were moderately correlated with the Mini-Mental State Exam score. Conclusion: A higher T2-SI and a lower ratio of ADC values in the centrum semiovale, may indicate presence of more severe white matter injury and clinical impairment. T2-SI ratio and ADC values in the centrum semiovale, are useful quantitative imaging biomarkers for correlation with clinical performance in individuals with carbon monoxide intoxication.

• Laboraroty Animal Research
• /
• v.34 no.4
• /
• pp.211-215
• /
• 2018

The following experiments were designed to examine the effect of serum of spayed dogs on superovulation response in mice and rats. In Experiment 1, female mice at diestrus (n=30) were divided into three equal groups and superovulated with either administration of 5 IU pregnant mare serum gonadotropin (PMSG) or recombinant follicle stimulating hormone (rFSH) (reducing dose from 2.5 to 0.5 IU) and 5 IU human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) administered 48h later. Serum of spayed dogs was administered intraperitoneally at a reduced dose from 0.1 to 0.025 mL in a 48 h period. In Experiment 2, female rats (n=30) at diestrus stage were divided into three equal groups. Superovulation was induced using either 30 IU PMSG, or a dose reduced from 5 to 1 IU rFSH and 25 IU hCG administered 48h later. Serum of spayed dogs was administered in a reduced dose from 0.6 to 0.1 mL in a 48 hour period. Female mice and rats were mated 24 h following hCG administration. On day 14 after mating, animals were euthanized and ovarian sections were fixed for histopathological evaluation and corpus luteum (CL) counting. No significant difference observed in mean (${\pm}SEM$) number of CLs between the PMSG group and the mice that received serum of spayed dog ($10.4{\pm}1.3$ vs $9.2{\pm}1.0$). Mean (${\pm}SEM$) number of CLs tended to be lower in rats that received serum of spayed dog than those of rats which received either PMSG or rFSH ($15.1{\pm}1.9$ vs $23.6{\pm}3.1$ and $23.1{\pm}2.9$, P=0.06, respectively). In conclusion, serum of spayed dogs is able to induce a superovulatory response in mice and rats.

• Journal of Animal Reproduction and Biotechnology
• /
• v.37 no.3
• /
• pp.155-161
• /
• 2022

Pregnancy-associated plasma protein-A (PAPP-A) is known as an important biomarker for fetal abnormality during first trimester and has a pivotal role in follicle development and corpus luteum formation. And also, it is being revealed that an expression of PAPP-A in various cells and tissues such as cancer and lesion area. PAPP-A is the major IGF binding protein-4 (IGFBP-4) protease. Cleavage of IGFBP-4 results in loss of binding affinity for IGF, causing increased IGF bioavailability for proliferation, survival, and migration. Additionally, PAPP-A can be used as a promising therapeutic target for healthy longevity. Despite growing interest, almost nothing is known about how PAPP-A expression is regulated in any tissue. This review will focus on what is currently known about the zinc metalloproteinase, PAPP-A, and its role in cells and tissues. PAPP-A is expressed in proliferating cells such as fetus in uterus, granulosa cells in follicle, dermis in wound, cancer cells, and Sertoli cells in testis. They have common characteristics of proliferation faster than normal cells with stimulating IGFs action and inhibiting IGFBPs. The PAPP-A functions and expression studies in livestock have not yet been conducted much. Further studies are needed to use PAPP-A as a marker for healthy longevity in animal science.

• Journal of Ginseng Research
• /
• v.46 no.1
• /
• pp.79-90
• /
• 2022

Background: Herbal medicines are popular approaches to capably prevent and treat obesity and its related diseases. Excessive exposure to dietary lipids causes oxidative stress and inflammation, which possibly induces cellular senescence and contribute the damaging effects in brain. The potential roles of selective enhanced ginsenoside in regulating high fat diet (HFD)-induced brain damage remain unknown. Methods: The protection function of Ginsenoside F1-enhanced mixture (SGB121) was evaluated by in vivo and in vitro experiments. Human primary astrocytes and SH-SY5Y cells were treated with palmitic acid conjugated Bovine Serum Albumin, and the effects of SGB121 were determined by MTT and lipid uptake assays. For in vivo tests, C57BL/6J mice were fed with high fat diet for 3 months with or without SGB121 administration. Thereafter, immunohistochemistry, western blot, PCR and ELISA assays were conducted with brain tissues. Results and conclusion: SGB121 selectively suppressed HFD-induced oxidative stress and cellular senescence in brain, and reduced subsequent inflammation responses manifested by abrogated secretion of IL-6, IL-1β and TNFα via NF-κB signaling pathway. Interestingly, SGB121 protects against HFD-induced damage by improving mitophagy and endoplasmic reticulum-stress associated autophagy flux and inhibiting apoptosis. In addition, SGB121 regulates lipid uptake and accumulation by FATP4 and PPARα. SGB121 significantly abates excessively phosphorylated tau protein in the cortex and GFAP activation in corpus callosum. Together, our results suggest that SGB121 is able to favor the resistance of brain to HFD-induced damage, therefore provide explicit evidence of the potential to be a functional food.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.41 no.3
• /
• pp.351-358
• /
• 2022

Recently, Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and Variational AutoEncoders (VAE) have been applied to voice conversion that can make use of non-parallel training data. Especially, Conditional Cycle-Consistent Generative Adversarial Networks (CC-GAN) and Cycle-Consistent Variational AutoEncoders (CycleVAE) show promising results in many-to-many voice conversion among multiple speakers. However, the number of speakers has been relatively small in the conventional voice conversion studies using the CC-GANs and the CycleVAEs. In this paper, we extend the number of speakers to 100, and analyze the performances of the many-to-many voice conversion methods experimentally. It has been found through the experiments that the CC-GAN shows 4.5 % less Mel-Cepstral Distortion (MCD) for a small number of speakers, whereas the CycleVAE shows 12.7 % less MCD in a limited training time for a large number of speakers.

• Development and Reproduction
• /
• v.26 no.4
• /
• pp.135-144
• /
• 2022

As the number of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccinations increases, various side effects are being reported, and menstrual abnormalities have been reported as a side effect in women. However, it is still unclear whether the COVID-19 vaccine has detrimental effects on the female reproductive system. Therefore, we investigated the effect of excessive immune response on reproductive function by administering Lipopolysaccharides (LPS) instead of the COVID-19 vaccine. The immune response in mice was induced by injection of LPS. Mice injected with saline 5 times were used as a control group, and mice injected with LPS 5 times were used as an experimental group. Repeated administration of LPS significantly reduced the number of corpus luteum (CL). On the other hand, the injection of LPS did not affect the development of follicles leading before the CL. The expression of the apoptosis-related genes Fas and Fas-L increased in the experimental group. In addition, the expression of the inflammation-related genes increased in the experimental group. In this study, we confirmed that LPS had detrimental effects on the uterus and ovaries in mice. These results suggest that injection of LPS can cause immune reactions within the uterus and ovaries and cause hormonal changes, which can have adverse effects such as abnormal operation or bleeding of the menstrual cycle. These results are expected to help determine the cause of decreased reproductive function, infertility, or physiological disorders caused by the COVID-19 vaccine.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.17 no.7
• /
• pp.1807-1822
• /
• 2023

Innovation and rapid increased functionality in user friendly smartphones has encouraged shutterbugs to have picturesque image macros while in work environment or during travel. Formal signboards are placed with marketing objectives and are enriched with text for attracting people. Extracting and recognition of the text from natural images is an emerging research issue and needs consideration. When compared to conventional optical character recognition (OCR), the complex background, implicit noise, lighting, and orientation of these scenic text photos make this problem more difficult. Arabic language text scene extraction and recognition adds a number of complications and difficulties. The method described in this paper uses a two-phase methodology to extract Arabic text and word boundaries awareness from scenic images with varying text orientations. The first stage uses a convolution autoencoder, and the second uses Arabic Character Segmentation (ACS), which is followed by traditional two-layer neural networks for recognition. This study presents the way that how can an Arabic training and synthetic dataset be created for exemplify the superimposed text in different scene images. For this purpose a dataset of size 10K of cropped images has been created in the detection phase wherein Arabic text was found and 127k Arabic character dataset for the recognition phase. The phase-1 labels were generated from an Arabic corpus of quotes and sentences, which consists of 15kquotes and sentences. This study ensures that Arabic Word Awareness Region Detection (AWARD) approach with high flexibility in identifying complex Arabic text scene images, such as texts that are arbitrarily oriented, curved, or deformed, is used to detect these texts. Our research after experimentations shows that the system has a 91.8% word segmentation accuracy and a 94.2% character recognition accuracy. We believe in the future that the researchers will excel in the field of image processing while treating text images to improve or reduce noise by processing scene images in any language by enhancing the functionality of VGG-16 based model using Neural Networks.

• Journal of Veterinary Clinics
• /
• v.40 no.3
• /
• pp.238-241
• /
• 2023

This study determined the effect of ovarian status at the beginning of the modified Double-Ovsynch program on reproductive performance in dairy cows. In the study, 1,302 cows were treated with a modified Double-Ovsynch program at 56 days after calving. This program comprises administering gonadotropin-releasing hormones (GnRH), prostaglandin F_2α (PGF_2α) 10 days later, GnRH 3 days later, GnRH 7 days later, and GnRH 56 h later, followed by timed artificial insemination (TAI) 16 h later. At the beginning of the program, cows were categorized according to the size of the largest follicle and the presence of a corpus luteum (CL) in the ovaries as follows: 1) small follicle (<5 mm, SF group, n = 100), 2) medium follicle (8-20 mm, MF group, n = 538), and 3) large follicle (≥25 mm, LF group, n = 354) without a CL, or 4) the presence of a CL (CL group, n = 310). The pregnancies per AI after the first TAI were analyzed by logistic regression using the LOGISTIC procedure, and the logistic model included the fixed effects of the herd size, parity, body condition score (BCS) at the first TAI, TAI period, and ovarian status. A larger herd size, higher BCS at the first TAI, and TAI period with no heat stress increased (p < 0.05) the probability of pregnancy per AI after the first TAI. However, ovarian status at the beginning of the program did not affect (p > 0.05) the pregnancies per AI (ranges of 37.9% to 42.9%). These results show that the modified Double-Ovsynch program can be used effectively while maintaining good fertility regardless of the ovarian status in dairy herds.

• Clinical Endoscopy
• /
• v.57 no.1
• /
• pp.65-72
• /
• 2024

Background/Aims: Multiple white and flat elevated lesions (MWFL) that develop from the gastric corpus to the fornix may be strongly associated with oral antacid intake. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the association between the occurrence of MWFL and oral proton pump inhibitor (PPI) intake and clarify the endoscopic and clinicopathological characteristics of MWFL. Methods: The study included 163 patients. The history of oral drug intake was collected, and serum gastrin levels and anti-Helicobacter pylori immunoglobulin G antibody titers were measured. Upper gastrointestinal endoscopy was performed. The primary study endpoint was the association between MWFL and oral PPI intake. Results: In the univariate analyses, MWFL were observed in 35 (49.3%) of 71 patients who received oral PPIs and 10 (10.9%) of 92 patients who did not receive oral PPIs. The occurrence of MWFL was significantly higher among patients who received PPIs than in those who did not (p<0.001). Moreover, the occurrence of MWFL was significantly higher in patients with hypergastrinemia (p=0.005). In the multivariate analyses, oral PPI intake was the only significant independent factor associated with the presence of MWFL (p=0.001; odds ratio, 5.78; 95% confidence interval, 2.06-16.2). Conclusions: Our findings suggest that oral PPI intake is associated with the presence of MWFL (UMINCTR 000030144).

• Journal of Society of Preventive Korean Medicine
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.59-75
• /
• 2005

The experiments were undertaken to evaluate the effects of Bosaengtang in pregnant rats and fetuses. Female Sprague-Dawley rats were orally administered with Bosaengtang at the dose of 5mg/kg/day for 20 days. Pregnant rats were sacrificed at the 20th day of gestation, and observed internal and reproductive organs. Fetuses were randomly selected and fixed in 95% ethanol. Fetuses were stained with alcian blue and alizarin red S, and observed skeletal malformations. The results obtained were as follows : Bosaengtang administered group showed higher maternal body weight than the control group, but both groups showed increase in weight. Bosaengtang administered group showed lower than the control group, and higher liver and kidney weight than the control group, but the differences were minimal. There were no significant changes between the control and treated group in blood chemistry values and hematological values but all the groups were within in normal ranges. There were no significant changes in the number of corpus luteum, implantation, live fetus and implantation rate, delivery rate, late resorption rate, sex ratio, but Bosaengtang administered group showed higher early resorption rate than control group. comparing the control and Bosaengtang group, neonatal body weight and the number of fetuses were increased in Bosaengtang group. The fetuses of dams treated with Oriental medicine didn't showed external malformation. Vertebral and sternal variations were observed in Bosaengtang group, but the differences were not apparent compared to the control group. The number of ribs, cervical, thoracic and lumbar vertebrae were normal. The number of sacral was similar and the number of caudal was increased. Fetuses showed significant difference in the number of caudal vertebrae. (P<0.01) From these results, we can carefully conclude that Bosaengtang showed beneficial effects on maternal body weight, early resorption rate, number of live fetus. There were no significant changes in organ weight, hematoscopy, reproduction organs. External malformation wasn't visible. Skeletal variations were showed in vertebrae and sternum but compared to the control group, these variations weren't much different.