Aim:Herbal plants and their derived products are extensively used particularly in many Asian, African, and other countries of the world as they are considered as ideal feed additives because of their non-residual effect and ability to influence the ecosystem of gastrointestinal microbiota in a positive way. Further, the enzymatic treatment of these herbs helps in their efficient utilization by the host. Dandelion leaves and fenugreek seeds have been reported to have positive effect in terms of improving the performance of broiler chicken, but not much literature is available regarding their effect on gut histomorphology; therefore, the present study was conducted to explore the effect of these herbs either alone or in combination with or without enzyme treatment on histomorphology of liver and small intestine of broiler chicken.Materials and Methods:To achieve the envisaged objective, 273-day-old commercial broiler chicks were procured from a reputed source and reared together until 7 days of age. On the 7th day, the chicks were individually weighed, distributed randomly into 7 groups of 3 replicates with 13 chicks each. Birds in the control group were fed diets without additives (T1). The other six treatment groups were fed the basal diet supplemented with 0.5% dandelion leaves (T2), 1% fenugreek seeds (T3), combination of 0.5% dandelion leaves and 1% fenugreek seeds (T4), enzyme treated dandelion leaves 0.5% (T5), enzyme treated fenugreek seeds 1% (T6), and combination of enzyme treated dandelion leaves (0.5%) and (1%) fenugreek seeds (T7). The histomorphological study of liver and small intestines was conducted among different treatment groups.Results:The results revealed the hepato-protective nature of both dandelion leaves and fenugreek seeds either alone or in combination with or without enzyme treatment when compared with the control group. Moreover, the histomorphological findings of jejunum revealed the beneficial effect of dandelion leaves, fenugreek seeds and enzymes on the intestinal mucosa in terms of cellular infiltration, architecture of villi, villus height/crypt depth ratio, thereby improving the intestinal health.Conclusion:The dandelion leaves and fenugreek seeds have hepato-protective nature and beneficial effect on the intestinal morphology particularly when included along with enzymes in the diet of broiler chicken.

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This paper presents a novel approach towards iris recognition based on dual boundary (Pupil-Iris & Sclera-Iris) detection and then using a modified Multilayer Feed Forward neural network (MFNN) to perform an efficient automatic classification. The novelty of the work resides in the fact that the proposed method features the localization of the dual iris boundaries to be used as feature vector for classification. The process of information extraction starts by preprocessing the eyeimage to remove specular highlight and then locating the pupil of the eye by using edge detection. The centroid of the detected pupil is chosen as the reference point for extracting the boundary points. The boundary points are recorded using radius vector functions approach. The proposed feature vector is obtained by concatenating the contour points of the Pupil-Iris boundary and the Sclera-Iris boundary which will yield a unique pattern named as Iris signature. The proposed method is translational and scale invariant. The classification is performed using the MFNN via a modified version of back-propagation algorithm which uses a time varying learning rate. The proposed system has been tested on moderate no of pictures taken from MMU iris database in the presence of additive noise for different values of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Experimental result for percentage recognition shows that the proposed method outperforms the single boundary method.

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