Leucocytozoonosis in domestic birds in southwestern iran: an ultrastructural study.

BACKGROUND: Leucocytozoonosis is a disease of birds caused by obligate intracellular protozoa of the genus Leucocytozoon. We determined the prevalence of Leucocytozoon spp. using light and transmission electron microscopy in domestic birds in southwest of Iran. METHODS: A total of 825 blood smears from 275 birds were examined for presence of infection. The structure morphology of Leucocytozoon spp. was studied using light and electron microscopy. RESULTS: Forty-four (16.0%) of the birds were positives for Leucocytozoon. The detected parasite were found in 14 chickens (5.1%), 12 geese (4.3%), 10 ducks (3.6%), and 8 turkeys (2.9%). The majority of the records were from the northeastern regions. CONCLUSION: Leucocytozoonosis are distributed in the Lorestan province bird population and electron microscopy can resolve the problem to distinguish between similar species of Leucocytozoon.

Cerebral neuroblastoma and pituitary adenocarcinoma in two budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus).

Case 1: A tumor mass involving the rostral part of left cerebrum was found in a two-year-old female budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus) at necropsy. Histologically, the neoplastic cells were arranged in sheets or cords and occasionally showed nest growth patterns. These uniform tumor cells had a little cytoplasm and ovoid or round basophilic nuclei with clearly distinct cytoplasmic membranes. The tumor cells were strong diffusely immunostained with both neuron-specific enolase (NSE) and neurofilament protein and partially for synaptophysin. They lacked chromogranin A, glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), vimentin, S-100, and cytokeratin antigen expression. Moreover, they had no reaction to antibodies against pituitary hormones, such as adrenocorticotrophic hormone (ACTH), growth hormone, and prolactin. The histological and immunohistochemical examination determined the tumor as neuroblastoma. Case 2: An extremely enlarged pituitary mass was found above the sella turcica of a male budgerigar. It was soft and well delineated from the adjacent structures. On histological examination, this tumor consisted of a sheet of large closely packed polyhedral cells that had scant to a large amount of pale to strongly eosinophilic cytoplasm. The pleomorphic nuclei were apparently variable in shape, from small round hyperchromatic to very large vesicular forms. The cell boundaries were not clearly distinct. The multifocal immunolabelling of neoplastic cells for NSE, synaptophysin, GFAP, and ACTH appeared, whereas a few cells reacted with vimentin and S-100 and stained negative for other markers, which were also utilized for case 1. Histological and immunohistochemical findings led to identification of corticotroph adenocarcinoma in the pituitary gland.

Recognition of daily life motor activity classes using an artificial neural network.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate a possible role of artificial neural networks for the automated recognition and classification of daily life activities (eg, sitting, lying, standing, walking, etc) in an attempt to reduce the cost of manual recognition and classification. METHODS: Data from sessions of about 10 hours of continuous recording of eight ambulatory patients were used to train and evaluate eight probabilistic neural networks, each of which is configured for one subject. To provide the reference data for building the training set, the instrumented subject follows a 15- to 30-minute protocol consisting of several daily life activities. To properly evaluate the networks, the remaining manually labeled data of each subject were compared with the output of each trained network. RESULTS: The average recognition rate of the trained neural networks was equal to 95% good classification of all presented cases of the daily life activity. Automatic misclassification of 5% resulted from certain activities being too short or the occurrence of activities that were not included in the training set. CONCLUSION: The preliminary results of the trained neural networks have indicated that the probabilistic neural network is a potentially useful tool for the recognition of daily life motor activities.

Computerized analysis of daily life motor activity for ambulatory monitoring.

The primary goal of an ambulatory monitoring of motor activities (AMMA) system is to document the occurrence of random and spontaneous motor activities (e.g., sitting, lying, standing, walking, running, etc.) of the ambulatory subject in natural environmental circumstances. Much progress has been made in recording fidelity, reduction in energy requirement, fixation of the accelerometers, equipment size and weight, memory capacity and data acquisition. At present, our laboratory is interested in developing an automated off-line AMMA-signal analysis system. The system has to take care of activity (wave) detection, recognition of onsets and endpoints of the various activities (waves), and computation of a set of relevant clinical parameters (e.g., total walking time, number of times rising from a chair, etc.) from long-term recorded data. Two methods are currently being used for computerizing the off-line analysis system: using an artificial neural network and using a set of selected features extracted from the input data. The present paper is aimed at the latter method. The method was successfully applied to long-term recorded data sets of eight male amputees and three other subjects. The primary results indicate that the method is a potentially useful too to computerize the off-line analysis system.

Conditions that lithium inhibits or potentiates vasopressin V1-receptor-mediated platelet aggregation and [Ca++]i mobilization.

1. Besides clinical use, there are many explanations for the mechanism of action of lithium. Although it is shown that lithium may reduce the supply of inositol that is required to sustain phosphoinositide synthesis, evidence exists concerning the potentiating effect of lithium on this pathway. We therefore decided to evaluate conditions in which lithium inhibits or potentiates platelet aggregation and calcium response induced by vasopressin. 2. Platelet aggregation was measured by the photometric method, and changes in intracellular free calcium were measured using fura-2/AM. 3. We show an inhibitory action of neomycin on vasopressin-induced platelet aggregation. Lithium, according to the preincubation time, could both potentiate or inhibit platelet aggregation and calcium responses induced by vasopressin. The inhibitory effect of lithium on platelet aggregation is dependent on concentrations of both lithium and vasopressin and also the presence of indomethacin, for example, in the absence of indomethacin there was no clear inhibitory action of lithium on vasopressin-induced platelet aggregation. 4. These results show the importance of arachidonate metabolites concerning lithium effects on platelet V1-receptor signaling. In conclusion, because the arachidonate metabolites are responsible for the release of other active substances from platelets' granules, the aggregatory responses in the absence of indomethacin may be amplified, and this subsequently may change the net inhibitory action of lithium.