Screening of the equine intestinal microflora for potential probiotic organisms.

REASONS FOR PERFORMING STUDY: Probiotics have not been demonstrated to provide any beneficial health effects in horses, possibly because of improper selection of probiotic organisms. This study was designed to identify lactic acid bacteria of equine origin with predetermined beneficial properties which might make them useful as therapeutic probiotics. HYPOTHESIS: A small percentage of lactic acid bacteria that are native to the intestinal tract of horses possess properties that may be useful in the treatment and/or prevention of gastrointestinal disease in horses. METHODS: Faecal samples were collected from healthy mature horses and foals. Lactic acid bacteria were isolated and tested for the ability to grow in acid and bile environments, aerotolerance and in vitro inhibition of enteropathogens. One isolate that possessed these properties was administered orally to healthy mature horses and foals and gastrointestinal survival was assessed. RESULTS: Of the 47 tested organisms, 18 were deemed to be adequately acid- and bile-tolerant. All were aerotolerant. Four organisms markedly inhibited Salmonella spp. One isolate, Lactobacillus pentosus WE7, was subjectively superior and chosen for further study. It was also inhibitory against E. coli, moderately inhibitory against S. zooepidemicus and C. difficile and mildly inhibitory against C. perfringens. After oral administration, this isolate was recovered from the faeces of 8/9 (89%) foals and 7/8 (87.5%) mature horses. CONCLUSIONS: Lactobacillus pentosus WE7 possesses in vitro and in vivo properties that may be useful for the prevention and treatment of enteric disease in horses. POTENTIAL RELEVANCE: The beneficial in vitro and in vivo properties that L. pentosus WE7 possesses indicate that randomised, blinded, placebo-controlled efficacy studies are warranted.

Application of the intelligent techniques in transplantation databases: a review of articles published in 2009 and 2010.

The replacement of defective organs with healthy ones is an old problem, but only a few years ago was this issue put into practice. Improvements in the whole transplantation process have been increasingly important in clinical practice. In this context are clinical decision support systems (CDSSs), which have reflected a significant amount of work to use mathematical and intelligent techniques. The aim of this article was to present consideration of intelligent techniques used in recent years (2009 and 2010) to analyze organ transplant databases. To this end, we performed a search of the PubMed and Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Knowledge databases to find articles published in 2009 and 2010 about intelligent techniques applied to transplantation databases. Among 69 retrieved articles, we chose according to inclusion and exclusion criteria. The main techniques were: Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Logistic Regression (LR), Decision Trees (DT), Markov Models (MM), and Bayesian Networks (BN). Most articles used ANN. Some publications described comparisons between techniques or the use of various techniques together. The use of intelligent techniques to extract knowledge from databases of healthcare is increasingly common. Although authors preferred to use ANN, statistical techniques were equally effective for this enterprise.

Artificial intelligence techniques: predicting necessity for biopsy in renal transplant recipients suspected of acute cellular rejection or nephrotoxicity.

The gold standard for nephrotoxicity and acute cellular rejection (ACR) is a biopsy, an invasive and expensive procedure. More efficient strategies to screen patients for biopsy are important from the clinical and financial points of view. The aim of this study was to evaluate various artificial intelligence techniques to screen for the need for a biopsy among patients suspected of nephrotoxicity or ACR during the first year after renal transplantation. We used classifiers like artificial neural networks (ANN), support vector machines (SVM), and Bayesian inference (BI) to indicate if the clinical course of the event suggestive of the need for a biopsy. Each classifier was evaluated by values of sensitivity and area under the ROC curve (AUC) for each of the classifiers. The technique that showed the best sensitivity value as an indicator for biopsy was SVM with an AUC of 0.79 and an accuracy rate of 79.86%. The results were better than those described in previous works. The accuracy for an indication of biopsy screening was efficient enough to become useful in clinical practice.