Background: Cartilaginous disorders comprise a wide range of diseases that affect normal joint movement, ear and nose shape; and they have great social and economic impact. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) provide a promising regeneration alternative for treatment of degenerative cartilaginous disorders. This study aimed to compare therapeutic potential of different types of laser activated MSCs to promote auricular cartilage regeneration. Twelve adult rabbit allocated equally in four groups, all animals received a surgical mid auricular cartilage defect in one ear; Group I (Positive control) injected sub-perichondrially with phosphate-buffered saline (PBS), Group II (ADMSC-transplanted group) injected adipose-derived MSCs (ADMSCs), Group III (BMMSCs-transplanted group) received bone marrow-derived MSCs (BMMSCs), and Group IV (EMSC-transplanted group) received ear MSCs (EMSCs) in the defected ear. The auricular defect was analyzed morphologically, histopathologically and immunohistochemically after 4 weeks. In addition, a quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction was used to examine expression of the collagen type II (Col II) and aggrecan as cartilage growth factors. Results: The auricles of all treatments appeared completely healed with smooth surfaces and similar tissue color. Histopathologically, defective areas of control positive group, ADMSCs and EMSCs treated groups experienced a small area of immature cartilage. While BMMSCs treated group exhibited typical features of new cartilage formation with mature chondrocytes inside their lacunae and dense extracellular matrix (ECM). In addition, BMMSC treated group showed a positive reaction to Masson’s trichrome and orcein stains. In contrary, control positive, ADMSC and EMSC groups revealed faint staining with Masson’s trichrome and Orcein. Immunohistochemically, there was an intense positive S100 expression in BMMSCs (with a significant increase of area percentage + 21.89 (P < 0.05), a moderate reaction in EMSCs (with an area percentage + 17.97, and a mild reaction in the control group and ADMSCs (area percentages + 8.02 and + 11.37, respectively). The expression of relative col II and aggrecan was substantially highest in BMMSCs (± 0.91 and ± 0.89, respectively). While, Control positive, ADMSCs and EMSCs groups recorded (± 0.41: ± 0.21, ± 0.6: ± 0.44, ± 0.61: ± 0.63) respectively. Conclusion: BMMSCs showed the highest chondrogenic potential compared to ADMSCs and EMSCs and should be considered the first choice in treatment of cartilaginous degenerative disorders.

Ultrasonography with color Doppler is the most quantitative analysis method for intra-renal parameters. There is a wide variation between authors in the measurement site and referencing the inter-lobar resistivity index (RI) in felines. Our objective is to morphometrically and ultrasonographically investigate the normal renal dimensions and vasculatures and draw up a normal reference value for the renal inter-lobar artery resistivity index (RI) using a Pulsed wave-Doppler ultrasonography. A total of twelve adult domestic cats were sedated and treated according to IACUC regulation guidelines to be examined using Doppler ultrasound. The same cats were used for morphometric investigation and divided into three groups regarding the used technique. The size difference between the right and left kidneys is slight, measuring 17 g (weight), 3.65 ± 0.06 cm (length), 2.54 ± 0.08 cm (width), and 2.21 ± 0.03 cm (thickness) for the right kidney, and about 15 g, 3.42 ± 0.06 cm, 2.32 ± 0.05 cm, and 2.13 ± 0.03 cm for the left one, respectively. There are three patterns of renal arteries’ point of origin. The mean RI values of both kidneys were 0.57 ± 0.08 (0.50–0.67) in the right kidney and 0.60 ± 0.08 (0.51–0.69) in the left kidney. The gross examination and ultrasonography measurements did not have a statistically different effect on the actual renal dimensions. Moreover, 0.69 is considered the standard resistivity index (RI) threshold of the feline inter-lobar artery with no correlation to the animal’s body weight.

The present investigation was performed to transpire the celiac artery distribution, histological, and histochemical characteristics of the proventriculus in eight adult barn owls (Tyto alba) of both sexes. Six birds were subjected to anatomical investigation of the celiac artery distribution and two owls were used for routine histomorphological techniques. The proventricular length, width, and lumen diameter were measured at 14.18 ± 0.08, 6.46 ± 0.17 and 1.46 ± 0.14 mm, respectively. The celiac artery in barn owl gave off six collateral arteries before its division into right and left branches. The arteria hepatica dextra does not originate from the right celiac division. Unlike other birds, there were left dorsal and left ventral gastric arteries. Histologically, the proventricular wall consisted of main four tunics. The lining epithelium is simple columnar with plicae and sulci. The muscularis mucosa is absent. The submucosal gastric glands were in two rows in the cranial proventricular portion while were arranged in one parallel row in the middle and caudal portions with pear-shaped, oval to round tubuloalveolar lobules. The mucosal folds, tubular mucosal glands, tubuloalveolar lobules, and their mucus secretion in the collecting ducts were positively reacted to PAS and alcian blue stains. The interlobular collagen fibers, elastic fibers, and reticular network were intensely reacted to Masson’s trichrome, Orcein, and Gomori's reticulin stains, respectively. These anatomical and histomorphological features of the barn owl proventriculus were aimed to provide recent data comparable with most species of birds and the presence of diversity that might be attributed to their feeding demeanor.

The present investigation was carried out on cardiac ventricles of fourteen adult Egyptian domestic cats of both sexes after physical and ultrasonographic examination to identify, schematically classify and echocardiographically assess the ventricular musculofibrous or moderator bands a or septomarginal trabeculae. The bands are classified according to in- sertion points into six types I, II, III, IV, V, and VI, and subtypes of Ia, Ib, Ic, IIa, IIb, Va, Vb, VIa, and VIb. The M. papillaris magnus was the largest and the Mm. papillares parvi were found two or three in the right ventricle where they were inserted in the septum. The two papillary muscles of the left ventricle were at the same size except in one cat where the papillary subatrialis was twice larger than the subauricularis. The trabeculae car- neae form deep spaces in the right ventricles and shallow ones in the left ones. Echocardiographically, ventricular bands of the right ventricle were difficult to appear while in the left ventricle, there was one cat showed the presence of an echogenic fibromuscular band con-necting the left ventricular apex and the ventricular septum. In conclusion: Bands of subtypes Ib, Ic, and Vb were absent in the right ventricles While, Ia, Ib, and Va were absent in left ventricles. The echocardiographic evidence of the ventricular bands revealed no interference to the ventricular contractility based on the assessment of the systolic and diastolic function.

This paper proposes a simple yet effective method to improve direct (X-to-Y) translation for both cases: zero-shot and when direct data is available. We modify the input tokens at both the encoder and decoder to include signals for the source and target languages. We show a performance gain when training from scratch, or finetuning a pretrained model with the proposed setup. In the experiments, our method shows nearly 10.0 BLEU points gain on in-house datasets depending on the checkpoint selection criteria. In a WMT evaluation campaign, From-English performance improves by 4.17 and 2.87 BLEU points, in the zero-shot setting, and when direct data is available for training, respectively. While X-to-Y improves by 1.29 BLEU over the zero-shot baseline, and 0.44 over the many-to-many baseline. In the low-resource setting, we see a 1.5~1.7 point improvement when finetuning on X-to-Y domain data.