The aim of this study was to investigate the anticarcinogenic effects of silymarin in diethylnitrosamine (DEN)-induced hepatocarcinogenic rat models. Severe and mild models of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) were generated by the intraperitoneal administration of 40 mg/kg DEN once a week for 18 weeks and 100 mg/kg DEN every 2 weeks for 6 weeks in male Wistar rats, respectively. In the severe and mild models of HCC, the rats were treated with 0.1 and 0.5% silymarin for 18 weeks and with 0.1% silymarin for 5 weeks, respectively. Serum transaminase levels were not significantly decreased by the silymarin treatment in either model. Macroscopic and microscopic features indicated that the silymarin-containing formulations did not significantly inhibit the hepatic tumor formation induced by DEN. Furthermore, immunohistochemical and western blot analyses demonstrated that the expression levels of proliferating cell nuclear antigen and glutathione S-transferase P, which are hepatocarcinogenic markers, were not significantly modified by the silymarin treatment. These results indicate that silymarin may not be considered as a candidate agent against hepatocarcinogenesis.

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Providing feedback on the argumentation of learner is essential for development of critical thinking skills, but it takes a lot of time and effort. To reduce the burden on teachers, we aim to automate a process of giving feedback, especially giving diagnostic comments which point out the weaknesses inherent in the argumentation. It is advisable to give specific diagnostic comments so that learners can recognize the diagnosis without misunderstanding. However, it is not obvious how the task of providing specific diagnostic comments should be formulated. We present a formulation of the task as template selection and slot filling to make an automatic evaluation easier and the behavior of the model more tractable. The key to the formulation is the possibility of creating a template set that is sufficient for practical use. In this paper, we define three criteria that a template set should satisfy: expressiveness, informativeness, and uniqueness, and verify the feasibility to create a template set that satisfies these criteria as a first trial. We will show that it is feasible through an annotation study that converts diagnostic comments given in text into a template format. The corpus used in the annotation study is publicly available.