All issues

Expert systems imitate professional experience and thinking process of a specialist to solve problems in various subject areas. An example of the problem that it is expedient to solve with the help of the expert system is the problem of forming a diagnosis that arises in technology, medicine, and other fields. When solving the diagnostic problem, it is necessary to anticipate the occurrence of critical or emergency situations in the future. They are situations, which require timely intervention of specialists to prevent critical aftermath. Fuzzy sets theory provides one of the approaches to solve ill-structured problems, diagnosis-making problems belong to which. The theory of fuzzy sets provides means for the formation of linguistic variables, which are helpful to describe the modeled process. Linguistic variables are elements of fuzzy logical rules that simulate the reasoning of professionals in the subject area. To develop fuzzy rules it is necessary to resort to a survey of experts. Knowledge engineers use experts’ opinion to evaluate correspondence between a typical current situation and the risk of emergency in the future. The result of knowledge extraction is a description of linguistic variables that includes a combination of signs. Experts are involved in the survey to create descriptions of linguistic variables and present a set of simulated situations.When building such systems, the main problem of the survey is laboriousness of the process of interaction of knowledge engineers with experts. The main reason is the multiplicity of questions the expert must answer. The paper represents reasoning of the method, which allows knowledge engineer to reduce the number of questions posed to the expert. The paper describes the experiments carried out to test the applicability of the proposed method. An expert system for predicting risk groups for neonatal pathologies and pregnancy pathologies using the proposed knowledge extraction method confirms the feasibility of the proposed approach.

Industrial robots have made it possible for robotics to become a worldwide discipline both in economy and in science. However, their capabilities are limited, especially regarding contact tasks where it is required to regulate or at least limit contact forces. At one point, it was noticed that elasticity in the joint transmission, which was treated as a drawback previously, is actually helpful in this regard. This observation led to the introduction of elastic joint robots that are well-suited to contact tasks and cooperative behavior in particular, so they become more and more widespread nowadays. Many researchers try to implement such devices not with trivial series elastic actuators (SEA) but with more sophisticated variable stiffness actuators (VSA) that can regulate their own mechanical stiffness. All elastic actuators demonstrate shock robustness and safe interaction with external objects to some extent, but when stiffness may be varied, it provides additional benefits, e. g., in terms of energy efficiency and task adaptability. Here, we present a novel variable stiffness actuator with a magnetic coupler as an elastic element. Magnetic transmission is contactless and thus advantageous in terms of robustness to misalignment. In addition, the friction model of the transmission becomes less complex. It also has milder stiffness characteristic than typical mechanical nonlinear springs, moreover, the stiffness curve has a maximum after which it descends. Therefore, when this maximum torque is achieved, the coupler slips, and a new pair of poles defines the equilibrium position. As a result, the risk of damage is smaller for this design solution. The design of the joint is thoroughly described, along with its mathematical model. Finally, the control system is also proposed, and simulation tests confirm the design ideas.

Control theory methods for creating market structures are discussed for two cases: when market participants are pursuing aims 1) of maximal growth and 2) of maximum economic efficiency of their firms. For the first case method based on variable structure systems principles is developed. For the second case dynamic game approach is proposed based on computation of Nash–Cournot and Stackelberg strategies with the help of Z-transform.

Radiopharmaceuticals with iodine radioisotopes are now widely used in imaging and non-imaging methods of nuclear medicine. When evaluating the results of radionuclide studies of the structural and functional state of organs and tissues, parallel modeling of the kinetics of radiopharmaceuticals in the body plays an important role. The complexity of such modeling lies in two opposite aspects. On the one hand, excessive simplification of the anatomical and physiological characteristics of the organism when splitting it to the compartments that may result in the loss or distortion of important clinical diagnosis information, on the other – excessive, taking into account all possible interdependencies of the functioning of the organs and systems that, on the contrary, will lead to excess amount of absolutely useless for clinical interpretation of the data or the mathematical model becomes even more intractable. Our work develops a unified approach to the construction of mathematical models of the kinetics of radiopharmaceuticals with iodine isotopes in the human body during diagnostic and therapeutic procedures of nuclear medicine. Based on this approach, three- and four-compartment pharmacokinetic models were developed and corresponding calculation programs were created in the C⁺⁺ programming language for processing and evaluating the results of radionuclide diagnostics and therapy. Various methods for identifying model parameters based on quantitative data from radionuclide studies of the functional state of vital organs are proposed. The results of pharmacokinetic modeling for radionuclide diagnostics of the liver, kidney, and thyroid using iodine-containing radiopharmaceuticals are presented and analyzed. Using clinical and diagnostic data, individual pharmacokinetic parameters of transport of different radiopharmaceuticals in the body (transport constants, half-life periods, maximum activity in the organ and the time of its achievement) were determined. It is shown that the pharmacokinetic characteristics for each patient are strictly individual and cannot be described by averaged kinetic parameters. Within the framework of three pharmacokinetic models, “Activity–time” relationships were obtained and analyzed for different organs and tissues, including for tissues in which the activity of a radiopharmaceutical is impossible or difficult to measure by clinical methods. Also discussed are the features and the results of simulation and dosimetric planning of radioiodine therapy of the thyroid gland. It is shown that the values of absorbed radiation doses are very sensitive to the kinetic parameters of the compartment model. Therefore, special attention should be paid to obtaining accurate quantitative data from ultrasound and thyroid radiometry and identifying simulation parameters based on them. The work is based on the principles and methods of pharmacokinetics. For the numerical solution of systems of differential equations of the pharmacokinetic models we used Runge–Kutta methods and Rosenbrock method. The Hooke–Jeeves method was used to find the minimum of a function of several variables when identifying modeling parameters.