Effects of Long-Term Coated Sodium Butyrate Supplementation on the Intestinal Health and Colonization of Cecal Salmonella of Laying Hens Infected with Salmonella enteritidis.

Salmonella enterica ser. Enteritidis (S. Enteritidis) is widely found in chickens and eggs, and it can potentially induce human illness. The investigation in this study centers on the impacts of long-term dietary supplementation with coated sodium butyrate (CSB) on intestinal well-being and the colonization of cecum Salmonella in laying hens infected with S. Enteritidis. We segregated a total of 120 Lohmann laying hens aged 51 weeks into four treatment categories: 0 (CON), 300 (CSB1), 500 (CSB2), and 800 (CSB3) mg/kg of CSB, supplemented with CSB from the first day of the experiment. A 24-week observation process was carried out for each laying hen. The S. Enteritidis was orally administered to all chickens on the morning of the first and third days of week 22 of the trial. After the S. Enteritidis challenge, egg production decreased the most in the CON group. Compared to the CON group, the three doses of CSB significantly improved egg production after the S. Enteritidis challenge (PANOVA < 0.05). S. Enteritidis challenge increased plasma DAO activity, but CSB supplementation reduced plasma DAO activity (Plinear < 0.05). The S. Enteritidis challenge disrupted intestinal villi morphology; compared to the CON group, the three dosages of CSB resulted in an increase in villus height (VH) and the ratio of villus height to crypt depth (V/C) in the duodenum, jejunum, and ileum of infected laying hens (Plinear < 0.05), with a significant increase in jejunal villus height (PANOVA < 0.05). A decrease in ileal crypt depth was also observed (Plinear < 0.05). CSB2 and CSB3 markedly increased the content of butyric acid in the cecum (PANOVA < 0.05). Additionally, in contrast to those in the CON group, the propionic acid content in the CSB supplementation group increased (Plinear < 0.05). Compared with those in the CON group, mRNA relative expression of the IL-6 and IL-1ß in jejunum (Plinear < 0.05) and mRNA relative expression of the IL-1ß in ileum (PANOVA < 0.05) were significantly lower, and mRNA relative expression of the IL-10 in ileum (Plinear < 0.05) were significantly higher in the CSB group. In addition, in contrast to the CON group, the CSB supplementation group significantly upregulated mRNA relative expression of the ZO-1 and CLDN1 (PANOVA < 0.05). Additionally, CSB supplementation reduced the number of Salmonella and increased the number of Lactobacilli in the cecum (Plinear < 0.05) and tended to increase the total bacteria count (Plinear = 0.069) and reduce the E. coli count (Plinear = 0.081). In conclusion, long-term dietary supplementation with coated sodium butyrate can alleviate intestinal injury and the colonization of cecum Salmonella in laying hens infected with S. Enteritidis.

Tunable Microwave Dielectric Properties in Rare-Earth Niobates via a High-Entropy Configuration Strategy To Induce Ferroelastic Phase Transition.

In this study, (La0.2Nd0.2Sm0.2Ho0.2Y0.2)(Nb1-xVx)O4 (0.1 ≤ x ≤ 0.4) ceramics were prepared using a high-entropy strategy via the solid-phase method. The crystal structure, microstructure, vibration modes, and phase transition were studied by X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy/transmission electron microscopy (SEM/TEM), and Raman spectroscopy techniques. The phase of ceramics was confirmed to be a monoclinic fergusonite in the range of x ≤ 0.28, a tetragonal scheelite was in the range of 0.3 ≤ x ≤ 0.32, a complex phase of tetragonal scheelite, and zircon was observed in the ceramics when x ≥ 0.35. A zircon phase was also detected by TEM at x = 0.4. The ceramic at x = 0.25 exhibited outstanding temperature stabilization with εr = 18.06, Q × f = 56,300 GHz, and τf = -1.52 ppm/°C, while the x = 0.2 ceramic exhibited a low dielectric loss with εr = 18.14, Q × f = 65,200 GHz, and τf = -7.96 ppm/°C. Moreover, the permittivity, quality factor, and the temperature coefficient of resonance frequency were related to the polarizability, packing fraction, density, and the temperature coefficient of permittivity caused by phase transition. This is an effective method to regulate near-zero τf by the synergism of the high-entropy strategy and substituting Nb with V in LnNbO4 ceramics.

Simultaneous degradation of sulfadiazine and dissolved organic matter based on low-impact development facilities.

Sulfadiazine (SD) is a common antibiotic administered to treat bacterial infections in livestock, and its fate and migration are greatly affected by dissolved organic matter (DOM). The soil infiltration system [a typical low-impact development (LID) facility] can significantly alter DOM properties during runoff pollution, thus affecting the complexation of SD with DOM. Here, the binding characteristics of different DOM components and SD in the soil infiltration system were explored using spectroscopic techniques (excitation-emission matrices, parallel factor analysis, and synchronous fluorescence spectroscopy). Combined with the weakening of DOM fluorescence intensity and 78.63% reduction in mean SD concentration following treatment, synchronous degradation may have occurred. The binding sequence of SD and DOM fluorophores was further explored using two-dimensional correlation spectroscopy. Effluent DOM showed greater sensitivity to SD and more binding sites than influent DOM. Moreover, hydrophobic protein-like substances exhibited higher log KM values than other fluorescent components, indicating that protein-like components play significant roles in SD complexation. The soil percolation system improved the complexation stability and binding sequence of fulvic-like substances. Thus, SD-DOM can be intercepted and degraded using LID facilities to reduce the risk of SD in aquatic environments.

JAAL-Net: a joint attention and adversarial learning network for skin lesion segmentation.

Objective.Skin lesion segmentation plays an important role in the diagnosis and treatment of melanoma. Existing skin lesion segmentation methods have trouble distinguishing hairs, air bubbles, and blood vessels around lesions, which affects the segmentation performance.Approach.To clarify the lesion boundary and raise the accuracy of skin lesion segmentation, a joint attention and adversarial learning network (JAAL-Net) is proposed that consists of a generator and a discriminator. In the JAAL-Net, the generator is a local fusion network (LF-Net) utilizing the encoder-decoder structure. The encoder contains a convolutional block attention module to increase the weight of lesion information. The decoder involves a contour attention to obtain edge information and locate the lesion. To aid the LF-Net generate higher confidence predictions, a discriminant dual attention network is constructed with channel attention and position attention.Main results.The JAAL-Net is evaluated on three datasets ISBI2016, ISBI2017 and ISIC2018. The intersection over union of the JAAL-Net on the three datasets are 90.27%, 89.56% and 80.76%, respectively. Experimental results show that the JAAL-Net obtains rich lesion and boundary information, enhances the confidence of the predictions, and improves the accuracy of skin lesion segmentation.Significance.The proposed approach effectively improves the performance of the model for skin lesion segmentation, which can assist physicians in accurate diagnosis well.

Improving sludge dewaterability via Fe2+ chelated citrate activated peroxydisulfate oxidation.

Citrate (Ct) was chosen as a typical chelator used in the Fe2+-peroxydisulfate (PDS) process to improve sludge dewaterability. The PDS-Fe2+-Ct process exhibited better performance in sludge dewatering than PDS-Fe2+. Specifically, with a PDS dosage of 1.2 mmol/g VS, the molar ratio of PDS/Fe2+ and Ct/Fe2+ were 4:5 and 1:4, respectively, the capillary suction time decreased from 155.8 to 24.8sec, and the sludge cake water content decreased from 82.62% to 64.11% (-0.06MPa). The oxidation led to a reduced negative charge and a decrease in particle size. The enhanced sludge dewaterability and changes of sludge properties were attributed to the decomposition of extracellular polymeric substances, and it was explored by protein, polysaccharide, 3D-EEMs, and FT-IR. Additionally, the quenching experiments of radical species demonstrated that SO4-• played a more important role than •OH, and its productivity was improved with the addition of Ct. Moreover, the reasons for the improved productivity of radicals with the addition of Ct were discussed. The results of this study could serve as a basis for improving sludge dewatering using the PDS-Fe2+-Ct process and suggest that the addition of Ct may improve the productivity of SO4-• in the activation of PDS via Fe2+.

Sponge-like Chitosan Based Porous Monolith for Uraemic Toxins Sorption.

More than three million patients are treated for kidney failure world-wide. Haemodialysis, the most commonly used treatment, requires large amounts of water and generates mountains of non-recyclable plastic waste. To improve the environmental footprint, dialysis treatments need to develop absorbents to regenerate the waste dialysate. Whereas conventional dialysis clears water-soluble toxins, it is not so effective in clearing protein-bound uraemic toxins (PBUTs), such as indoxyl sulfate (IS). Thus, developing absorption devices to remove both water-soluble toxins and PBUTs would be advantageous. Vapour induced phase separation (VIPS) has been used in this work to produce polycaprolactone/chitosan (PCL/CS) composite symmetric porous monoliths with extra porous carbon additives to increase creatinine and albumin-bound IS absorption. Moreover, these easy-to-fabricate porous monoliths can be formed into the required geometry. The PCL/CS porous monoliths absorbed 436 µg/g of albumin-bound IS and 2865 µg/g of creatinine in a single-pass perfusion model within 1 h. This porous PCL/CS monolith could potentially be used to absorb uraemic toxins, including PBUTs, and thus allow the regeneration of waste dialysate and the development of a new generation of environmentally sustainable dialysis treatments, including wearable devices.

MRI-based brain tumor segmentation using FPGA-accelerated neural network.

BACKGROUND: Brain tumor segmentation is a challenging problem in medical image processing and analysis. It is a very time-consuming and error-prone task. In order to reduce the burden on physicians and improve the segmentation accuracy, the computer-aided detection (CAD) systems need to be developed. Due to the powerful feature learning ability of the deep learning technology, many deep learning-based methods have been applied to the brain tumor segmentation CAD systems and achieved satisfactory accuracy. However, deep learning neural networks have high computational complexity, and the brain tumor segmentation process consumes significant time. Therefore, in order to achieve the high segmentation accuracy of brain tumors and obtain the segmentation results efficiently, it is very demanding to speed up the segmentation process of brain tumors. RESULTS: Compared with traditional computing platforms, the proposed FPGA accelerator has greatly improved the speed and the power consumption. Based on the BraTS19 and BraTS20 dataset, our FPGA-based brain tumor segmentation accelerator is 5.21 and 44.47 times faster than the TITAN V GPU and the Xeon CPU. In addition, by comparing energy efficiency, our design can achieve 11.22 and 82.33 times energy efficiency than GPU and CPU, respectively. CONCLUSION: We quantize and retrain the neural network for brain tumor segmentation and merge batch normalization layers to reduce the parameter size and computational complexity. The FPGA-based brain tumor segmentation accelerator is designed to map the quantized neural network model. The accelerator can increase the segmentation speed and reduce the power consumption on the basis of ensuring high accuracy which provides a new direction for the automatic segmentation and remote diagnosis of brain tumors.