The aim of the present research is to investigate breeders’ management strategies and their effects on reproductive performances in heritage breeds. A total 468 litters were analysed: Belgian Hare (N = 151), Burgundy Fawn 105), Californian 212). Litter size (born alive), percentage weaned kits selected analysed using a model that included breed, year birth, litter’s origin (with three levels: b...

Despite the known morphological differences (e.g., brain shape and size) in the brains of populations of different origins (e.g., age and race), the Chinese brain atlas is less studied. In the current study, we developed a statistical brain atlas based on a multi-center high quality magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) dataset of 2020 Chinese adults (18-76 years old). We constructed 12 Chinese brai...

Effects of Dorset, Finnsheep, Romanov, Texel, and Montadale breeds for performance as sires were estimated in the initial phase of a comprehensive evaluation of these breeds as contributors to sheep crossbreeding systems. Objectives were to evaluate the effects of ram breed, ewe breed, season of mating, and two-way interactions. Rams from the five breeds were single-sire-mated with ewes from tw...

The objective of this study was to determine the relationship between body weight (BW) and heart girth (HG) in Sardi and Timahdite sheep in order to develop a prediction equation of BW from HG. The data used for this study included 476 records on BW and HG (227 in Sardi and 249 in Timahdite) collected on males and females of different ages in 33 private farms. The BW and the HG averaged 34.8 ± ...

Weight and feed consumption of 197 bulls were recorded monthly in a serial slaughter experiment continuing over a period of 24 mo. The bulls were produced in a modified five-breed diallel of the Angus, Brahman, Hereford, Holstein and Jersey breeds. Our objective was to estimate efficiency of feed conversion for weight gain for each breed and cross. The model included average weight gain per day...

This study was carried out on five cattle groups, local, cross, Prim'Holstein, Montbeliard, and Brown of the Alps, in order to study the influence of breed on erythrocytes diameter. For each breed, blood samples were taken from 15 adult females by jugular venipuncture; blood smears were made on slides immediately after the blood collection and stained according to the method of May-Gründwald Gi...

A total of 2567 indigenous Greek ewes (Chios, Vlachiki and VlachikixChios breeds) were used to determine the optimum time for insemination, following synchronization of oestrus with MAP-impregnated intravaginal sponges and PMSG during non-breeding season. Within each breed group, the ewes were divided into three subgroups and submitted to a double blind cervical artificial insemination 48 and 6...

Mixed-breed rabbits in Poland are widely used for diagnostic and scientific research and as utility animals, therefore there is a need to know their immunological status, as well as their haematological status. In this study natural immunity factors were analyzed in Polish mixed-breed rabbits and Polish mixed-breed rabbits with addition of blood of meet-breed, considering the impact of sex and ...

Multi-atlas based methods have been recently used for classification of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its prodromal stage, that is, mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Compared with traditional single-atlas based methods, multiatlas based methods adopt multiple predefined atlases and thus are less biased by a certain atlas. However, most existing multiatlas based methods simply average or concatena...

In this paper, we present a new method for creating shadow texture atlas with which we can represent the self-shadow. Shadow texture atlas is a texture atlas with shadow information in each texel. Shadow texture is effective to represent high-quality shadow using the graphics hardware because it stores shadow information as color unlike shadow map which stores depth. However, it cannot represen...