Sarcocystosis is a zoonotic disease caused by Sarcocystis spp. with obligatory two host life cycle generally alternating between an herbivorous intermediate host and a carnivorous definitive host. Some species of this coccidian parasite can cause considerable morbidity and mortality in cattle. The present study was set to investigate the prevalence of Sarcocystis spp. and type of cyst wall in slaughtered cattle of Karaj abattoir, Iran. For this purpose 125 cattle (88 males and 37 females) were investigated for the presence of macroscopic and microscopic Sarcocystis cysts in muscular tissues. No macroscopic Sarcocystis cysts were found in any of the samples. In light microscopy, 121 out of 125 cattle (96.8 %) had thin-walled cysts of Sarcocystis cruzi, while 43 out of them (34.4 %) had thick-walled Sarcocystis cyst. In this survey, the most infected tissue was esophagus and heart and the less was diaphragm. Thin-walled cysts (S. cruzi) mostly found in heart and skeletal muscle showed the less. However, thick-walled cyst (S. hominis or S. hirsuta) mostly were detected in diaphragm, heart muscle showed no thickwalled cyst. No significant relation was observed between age and sex and the rate of infection. The results showed that Sarcocystis cyst is prevalent in cattle in the North part of Iran and the evaluation of infection potential can be useful when considering control programs.

No abstract

Managing a large volume of multimedia data containing various modalities such as visual, audio, and text reveals the necessity for efficient methods for modeling, processing, storing, and retrieving complex data. In this paper, we propose a fusion‐based approach at the query level to improve query retrieval performance of multimedia data. We discuss various flexible query types including the combination of content as well as concept‐based queries that provide users with the ability to efficiently perform multimodal querying. We have carried out a number of experiments on a video database to show the efficiency of our approach for various types of queries. Our experimental results show that our query‐level fusion approach presents a notable improvement in retrieval performance especially for the concept‐based queries.

No abstract

No abstract