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In experimental pain studies involving animals, subjective pain reports are not feasible. Current methods for detecting pain-related behaviors rely on human observation, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive, particularly for lengthy video recordings. Automating the quantification of these behaviors poses substantial challenges. In this study, we developed and evaluated a deep learning, multistream algorithm to detect pain-related grooming behaviors in rats. Pain-related grooming behaviors were induced by injecting small amounts of pain-inducing chemicals into the rats’ hind limbs. Day-long video recordings were then analyzed with our algorithm, which initially filtered out non-grooming segments. The remaining segments, referred to as likely grooming clips, were used for model training and testing. Our model, a multistream recurrent convolutional network, learned to differentiate grooming from non-grooming behaviors within these clips through deep learning. The average validation accuracy across three evaluation methods was 88.5%. We further analyzed grooming statistics by comparing the duration of grooming episodes between experimental and control groups. Results demonstrated statistically significant changes in grooming behavior consistent with pain expression.

Mercury (Hg) causes severe nephrotoxicity in subjects with excess exposure. This work attempted to identify whether a natural medicine—rhubarb—has protective effects against mercuric chloride (HgCl2)-induced acute renal failure (ARF), and which of its components contributed most to the treatment. Total rhubarb extract (TR) were separated to the total anthraquinones (TA), the total tannins (TT) and remaining component extract (RC). Each extract was orally pre-administered to rats for five successive days followed by HgCl2 injection to induce kidney injury. Subsequently, renal histopathology and biochemical examinations were performed in vitro to evaluate the protective effects. Pharmacological studies showed that TR and TA, but not TT or RC manifested significant protection activity against HgCl2-induced ARF. There were also significant declines of serum creatine, urea nitrogen values and increases of total protein albumin levels in TR and TA treated groups compared to HgCl2 alone (p < 0.05). At last, the major components in TA extract were further identified as anthraquinones by liquid chromatography coupled mass spectroscopy. This study thus provides observational evidences that rhubarb could ameliorate HgCl2-induced ARF and its anthraquinones in particular are the effective components responsible for this activity in rhubarb extract.