Meloxicam administration in the management of postoperative pain and inflammation associated with caesarean section in beef heifers: Evaluation of reproductive parameters.

Post-operative pain and inflammation are normal physiological reactions to caesarean section. Their management in cattle have rarely been investigated. This surgical procedure negatively affects reproductive function with, for example, a reduction in fertility resulting in an increase in calving interval. In this multicenter clinical trial, the objective was to evaluate the impact on reproductive performance of meloxicam injected before caesarean section to manage post-operative pain and inflammation. Meloxicam is a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug. One hundred and twenty-seven Charolais heifers (n = 127) were recruited from 47 farms in six French veterinary practices in the Burgundy region. The heifers underwent a non-elective standardized caesarean section operation. Heifers were randomly assigned to one of two groups: meloxicam (n = 66), intravenous meloxicam injection before surgery, or control (n = 61). Reproductive performance and health information were recorded from the time of the caesarean section to the next calving or to culling. In our study, meloxicam administration before caesarean section had no effect on the incidence of retained placenta (18.2% of treated vs 25.0% of control cows, p = 0.35). The pregnancy rate was higher in treated than in control cows (83.1% vs 67.8%, p = 0.04 after multivariate analysis) and a survival analysis showed that the median calving interval was 35 days shorter in the meloxicam (t50% = 417 days) compared to the control group (t50% = 452 days, p = 0.05). A trend was also observed for culling rate to be lower in treated (4.7%) compared to control cows (13.3%, p = 0.09). In conclusion, this study suggests that there is a beneficial effect of meloxicam administration before caesarean section on reproductive performance in Charolais heifers.

Computationally Efficient Transcranial Ultrasonic Focusing: Taking Advantage of the High Correlation Length of the Human Skull.

The phase correction necessary for transcranial ultrasound therapy requires numerical simulation to noninvasively assess the phase shift induced by the skull bone. Ideally, the numerical simulations need to be fast enough for clinical implementation in a brain therapy protocol and to provide accurate estimation of the phase shift to optimize the refocusing through the skull. In this article, we experimentally performed transcranial ultrasound focusing at 900 kHz on N = 5 human skulls. To reduce the computation time, we propose here to perform the numerical simulation at 450 kHz and use the corresponding phase shifts experimentally at 900 kHz. We demonstrate that a 450-kHz simulation restores 94.2% of the pressure when compared with a simulation performed at 900 kHz and 85.0% of the gold standard pressure obtained by an invasive time reversal procedure based on the signal recorded by a hydrophone placed at the target. From a 900- to 450-kHz simulation, the grid size is divided by 8, and the computation time is divided by 10.