Modern Units Research Articles

Outcomes and Predictors of Mortality Among Cardiac Intensive Care Unit Patients With Heart Failure

BackgroundLittle is known regarding the causes of critical illness and determinants of prognosis of patients with heart failure (HF) admitted to the modern cardiac intensive care unit (CICU). We sought to describe the epidemiology and outcomes of patients with HF admitted to the contemporary CICU. Methods and ResultsRetrospective cohort analysis of Mayo Clinic CICU patients admitted with HF from 2007 to 2018 who had left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) data. HF with reduced LVEF (HFrEF) was defined as a LVEF of less than 50%, and HF with preserved LVEF (HFpEF) as a LVEF of 50% or greater. In-hospital mortality was analyzed using multivariable logistic regression. Survival to 1 year was analyzed using a Kaplan–Meier analysis. We included 4012 patients, including 67.8% with HFrEF and 32.2% with HFpEF. Patients with HFrEF and HFpEF were comparable and had equivalent severity of illness. Critical care therapies were used in 59.4%, with a slight preponderance in patients with HFrEF. In-hospital mortality occurred in 12.5% of patients and was similar in HFrEF vs HFpEF. Shock and cardiac arrest were the strongest predictors of adjusted in-hospital mortality, followed by Braden skin score and serum chloride level; patients with HFrEF and HFpEF had similar adjusted mortality rates. The 1-year survival after hospital discharge was 74.5% and was slightly lower for patients with HFpEF. All-cause rehospitalization occurred in 36.6%, and 52.8% of hospital survivors died or were readmitted within 1 year. ConclusionsCICU patients with HF have a substantial burden of critical illness, high use of critical care therapies, and poor outcomes regardless of LVEF. This finding emphasizes the potential unmet care needs in this cohort. Lay summaryPatients with heart failure who require admission to the cardiac intensive care unit have high severity of illness and are at significant risk of death during and after hospitalization. These patients often require specialized critical care therapies to treat manifestations of critical illness. Patients who are admitted with cardiac arrest or shock, including those who require mechanical ventilation or vasopressors, are at particularly high risk of death. Patients’ left ventricular ejection fraction is not strongly associated with the risk of death when accounting for other major predictors including frailty and laboratory abnormalities.

Automatic Critical Care Consultation Does Not Improve Outcomes For Patients Receiving Mechanical Ventilation In A Cardiac Intensive Care Unit Staffed By A Dedicated Heart Failure Specialist

Background The modern cardiac intensive care unit (CICU) cares for increasingly complex patients with multiorgan system dysfunction, often including respiratory failure. Preliminary data suggests that having an automatic critical care consultation for patients on mechanical ventilation may improve outcomes. Whether this dedicated consultation also improves outcomes in a closed CICU staffed by heart failure physicians is unknown. Methods We performed a single-center retrospective study of consecutive patients who were admitted to the CICU between 2010-2017 and required mechanical ventilation for more than 24 hours. In 2014, the CICU became closed and staffed primarily by a heart failure physician. At that time, a policy of automatic critical care consultation for all mechanically ventilated patients was also implemented. We collected data on demographics and hospital-course for patients admitted before and after these changes in order to compare mortality and ventilation/intubation outcomes. We controlled for baseline comorbidities using multiple linear and logistic regression analyses. Results There were 581 patients included in the study; 159 admitted before 2014 and 422 after 2014. The most common reason for intubation in both groups was hypoxic respiratory failure (57.3% vs 48.8%, p=0.20) followed by need for airway protection (26.4% vs. 37.5%, p=0.08). Those admitted after 2014 had a significant reduction in 30-day mortality (OR 0.49, p=0.007), 1-year mortality (OR 0.502, p=0.02) and a reduction in re-intubations (OR 0.395, p=0.0008). They were also much more likely to have received critical care consultation (76.2% vs 31.4% before 2014, P<0.00001). Overall, patients who received consultations were more likely to remain on mechanical ventilation longer in the CICU (1.8 more days, p=0.003) and to require more re-intubations (OR 4.06, p=0.0005). Even among patients admitted after 2014, critical care consultation in the CICU had no added effect on mortality or ventilator outcomes and was again associated with an excess of 1.6 days of mechanical ventilation (p = 0.03). Conclusion Cardiac patients requiring mechanical ventilation had significantly improved mortality and airway outcomes when cared for by a dedicated heart failure specialist. Automatic critical care consultation added no additional improvement in mortality and was associated with longer durations of mechanical ventilation and more re-intubations. Further prospective studies in ventilated patients in CICUs will be needed to continue to improve care for this population. The modern cardiac intensive care unit (CICU) cares for increasingly complex patients with multiorgan system dysfunction, often including respiratory failure. Preliminary data suggests that having an automatic critical care consultation for patients on mechanical ventilation may improve outcomes. Whether this dedicated consultation also improves outcomes in a closed CICU staffed by heart failure physicians is unknown. We performed a single-center retrospective study of consecutive patients who were admitted to the CICU between 2010-2017 and required mechanical ventilation for more than 24 hours. In 2014, the CICU became closed and staffed primarily by a heart failure physician. At that time, a policy of automatic critical care consultation for all mechanically ventilated patients was also implemented. We collected data on demographics and hospital-course for patients admitted before and after these changes in order to compare mortality and ventilation/intubation outcomes. We controlled for baseline comorbidities using multiple linear and logistic regression analyses. There were 581 patients included in the study; 159 admitted before 2014 and 422 after 2014. The most common reason for intubation in both groups was hypoxic respiratory failure (57.3% vs 48.8%, p=0.20) followed by need for airway protection (26.4% vs. 37.5%, p=0.08). Those admitted after 2014 had a significant reduction in 30-day mortality (OR 0.49, p=0.007), 1-year mortality (OR 0.502, p=0.02) and a reduction in re-intubations (OR 0.395, p=0.0008). They were also much more likely to have received critical care consultation (76.2% vs 31.4% before 2014, P<0.00001). Overall, patients who received consultations were more likely to remain on mechanical ventilation longer in the CICU (1.8 more days, p=0.003) and to require more re-intubations (OR 4.06, p=0.0005). Even among patients admitted after 2014, critical care consultation in the CICU had no added effect on mortality or ventilator outcomes and was again associated with an excess of 1.6 days of mechanical ventilation (p = 0.03). Cardiac patients requiring mechanical ventilation had significantly improved mortality and airway outcomes when cared for by a dedicated heart failure specialist. Automatic critical care consultation added no additional improvement in mortality and was associated with longer durations of mechanical ventilation and more re-intubations. Further prospective studies in ventilated patients in CICUs will be needed to continue to improve care for this population.

Integrating palliative care into the modern cardiac intensive care unit: a review

The modern cardiac intensive care unit (CICU) specializes in the care of a broad range of critically ill patients with both cardiac and non-cardiac serious illnesses. Despite advances, most conditions that necessitate CICU admission such as cardiogenic shock, continue to have a high burden of morbidity and mortality. The CICU often serves as the final destination for patients with end-stage disease, with one study reporting that one in five patients in the USA die in an intensive care unit (ICU) or shortly after an ICU admission. Palliative care is a broad subspecialty of medicine with an interdisciplinary approach that focuses on optimizing patient and family quality of life (QoL), decision-making, and experience. Palliative care has been shown to improve the QoL and symptom burden in patients at various stages of illness, however, the integration of palliative care in the CICU has not been well-studied. In this review, we outline the fundamental principles of high-quality palliative care in the ICU, focused on timeliness, goal-concordant decision-making, and family-centred care. We differentiate between primary palliative care, which is delivered by the primary CICU team, and secondary palliative care, which is provided by the consulting palliative care team, and delineate their responsibilities and domains. We propose clinical triggers that might spur serious illness communication and reappraisal of patient preferences. More research is needed to test different models that integrate palliative care in the modern CICU.

Accelerating Deep Learning Using Interconnect-Aware UCX Communication for MPI Collectives

Deep learning workloads on modern multi-graphics processing unit (GPU) nodes are highly dependent on intranode interconnects, such as NVLink and PCIe, for high-performance communication. In this article, we take on the challenge to design an interconnect-aware multipath GPU-to-GPU communication using unified communication X (UCX) to utilize all available bandwidth for both NVLink-based systems and those that use a mixture of NVLink and PCIe. Our proposed multipath data transfer mechanism pipelines and stripes the message across multiple intrasocket communication channels and memory regions to achieve 1.84× higher bandwidth for Open message passing interface (MPI) on NVLink-based systems and 1.23× on NVLink and PCIe systems. We then utilize this mechanism to propose a three-stage hierarchical, pipelined MPI_Allreduce design as well as a flat pipelined two-stage algorithm for two different node topologies. For large messages, our proposed algorithms achieve a high speedup when compared to other MPI implementations. We also observe significant speedup for the proposed MPI_Allreduce with Horovod + TensorFlow with a variety of deep learning models.

Анализ словообразовательных механизмов формирования сленговых выражений молодежной среды в китайском языке

The paper aims to identify the specificity of the word-formation mechanisms of creating slang expressions by young people in the Chinese language. The article analyzes the definitions of the notion “slang” in the Chinese linguistics. The scientific originality of the research lies in the fact that it considers and analyzes new slang expressions which came from the popular video platform TikTok, as well as identifies the Internet slang development tendencies in the modern Chinese language. The results of the research show the creation sources and the word-formation means of the modern slang units in the Chinese language which are characterized by social and cultural connotations.

Development and evaluation of continuous inshelled walnut processing system

AbstractWalnut is one of the high yielding fruit crops grown in union territory of Jammu and Kashmir (J&amp;K) in India. However, processing of walnuts in J&amp;K is being carried out manually, which is very tedious, troublesome, and time and labor consuming. Thus, the present work was undertaken with an aim to develop a single mechanized continuous system for post‐harvest handling and processing of walnuts. The innovation composed of dehulling, bleaching, washing, drying, and grading units, besides conveyors to carry walnuts from one unit to another. The dehulling efficiency (95.70%), bleaching efficiency (96.28%), washing efficiency (99.10%), and grading efficiency (97.43%) recorded for the developed system are much higher than the manual processing. Furthermore, number of partially dehulled, un‐dehulled, partially bleached, unbleached, and damaged walnut percentages were recorded significantly (p &lt; 0.05) lower whereas fully dehulled and fully bleached walnut percentages were recorded significantly (p &lt; 0.05) higher in case of developed system as compared with manual processing. Overall capacity and efficiency of the developed system were recorded as 800 kg/day and 97.02%, respectively. The labor requirement for processing 1 ton of walnuts using developed system was determined to be 10 man h. The economic analysis indicated that adoption of developed system for walnut processing can be highly beneficial and economic. Thus, developed system can be a feasible alternative to minimize the post‐harvest losses, to maintain the quality, and to overcome the drudgery, boredom, and constraints associated with manual post‐harvest handling and processing of walnuts.Practical ApplicationsJammu and Kashmir (J&amp;K) has the largest share in India's total walnut production. However, from the last few years, there has been a setback to the export trade potential of walnuts in India, mainly due to import of walnuts from China and California. The walnuts from California and China have better consumer acceptability than walnuts of J&amp;K, which has badly affected the walnut trade in India. In J&amp;K, post‐harvest handling of walnuts is being done manually without any scientific and mechanical arbitration, which leads to quality deterioration of walnuts. Therefore, in order to compete at international level, there is an immediate need to shift the post‐harvest handling of walnuts from manual to mechanized. Thus, the adoption of developed continuous inshelled walnut processing system can play a vital role in sustaining the rural economy of J&amp;K through production and sale of good quality walnuts. Furthermore, the developed system can serve as a benchmark for establishment of modern walnut processing units, which can lead to employment generation and boost the walnut trade in J&amp;K.

Multi-Branching Temporal Convolutional Network for Sepsis Prediction.

Sepsisis among the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in modern intensive care units. Accurate sepsis prediction is of critical importance to save lives and reduce medical costs. The rapid advancements in sensing and information technology facilitate the effective monitoring of patients' health conditions, generating a wealth of medical data, and provide an unprecedented opportunity for data-driven diagnosis of sepsis. However, real-world medical data are often complexly structured with a high level of uncertainty (e.g., missing values, imbalanced data). Realizing the full data potential depends on developing effective analytical models. In this paper, we propose a novel predictive framework with Multi-Branching Temporal Convolutional Network (MB-TCN) to model the complexly structured medical data for robust prediction of sepsis. The MB-TCN framework not only efficiently handles the missing value and imbalanced data issues but also effectively captures the temporal pattern and heterogeneous variable interactions. We evaluate the performance of the proposed MB-TCN in predicting sepsis using real-world medical data from PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2019. Experimental results show that MB-TCN outperforms existing methods that are commonly used in current practice.

A parallel modular computing environment for three-dimensional multiresolution simulations of compressible flows

Numerical investigation of compressible flows faces two main challenges. In order to accurately describe the flow characteristics, high-resolution nonlinear numerical schemes are needed to capture discontinuities and resolve wide convective, acoustic and interfacial scale ranges. The simulation of realistic three-dimensional (3D) problems with state-of-the-art finite-volume method (FVM) based on approximate Riemann solvers with weighted nonlinear reconstruction schemes requires the usage of high-performance computing (HPC) architectures. Efficient compression algorithms reduce computational and memory load. Fully adaptive multiresolution (MR) algorithms with LTS have proven their potential for such applications. While modern central processing units (CPUs) requires multiple levels of parallelism to achieve peak performance, the fine-grained MR mesh adaptivity results in challenging compute/communication patterns. Moreover, local time stepping (LTS) incurs strong data dependencies which challenge a parallelization strategy.We address these challenges with a block-based MR algorithm, where arbitrary cuts in the underlying octree are possible. This allows for a parallelization on distributed-memory machines via the Message Passing Interface (MPI). We obtain neighbor relations by a simple bit-logic in a modified Morton Order. The block-based concept allows for a modular setup of the source code framework in which the building blocks of the algorithm, such as the choice of the Riemann solver or the reconstruction stencil, are interchangeable without loss of parallel performance. We present the capabilities of the modular framework with a range of test cases and scaling analysis with effective resolutions beyond one billion cells using O(104) cores.

Sustainable transition of the primary steel production: Carbon footprint studies of hot-rolled coil according to ISO 14067

A shift away from traditional carbon-based towards a hydrogen-based steel production has to be stepwise so that technological challenges can be solved simultaneously to various other challenges like the evolution of green markets, political framework as well as the creation of hydrogen supply. First bridge technologies towards hydrogen-based steelmaking are crucial to generate a stable demand for hydrogen so that hydrogen supply can follow. Injection of hydrogen into existing blast furnaces is a prominent example to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions without the ambition to reach complete carbon neutrality. A subsequent next step on the way towards climate neutrality are modern Direct reduction units. This technology is able to reduce Iron oxides by natural gas and hydrogen, respectively. Within the existing plants Direct reduction units can be incorporated in various ways over time, thus offering a gradual and in the end complete transition to hydrogen and electricity based production. Since LCA studies provide crucial input for political and market-economy decision-making, the LCA community is of great importance for giving direction of transformation processes. Like other industries, the steel industry needs an allocation approach for greenhouse gas emission savings to evolve green markets, of which the methodology shall be discussed within the life cycle community. The current study presents carbon footprint assessments (ISO 14067) of hot-rolled coil for different future production scenarios. The following production routes are investigated: - Conventional blast furnace – basic oxygen furnace route - Injection of H2 into a blast furnace - Input of H2-based direct reduced iron (DRI) into a blast furnace - H2-based direct reduction combined with electrically melting from renewable energy.

Проработка концепции автомобиля с гибридной силовой установкой

Residents of large cities suffer greatly from air pollutants, a significant proportion of which is accounted for the road transport. In order to solve this issue, car manufacturers are upgrading internal combustion engines, designing alternative engine units. This article analyzes various modern engine units, highlights their strengths and weaknesses. Statistical data demonstrating the growth of production and sales of electric and hybrid vehicles in Russia and abroad are presented. Cars equipped with traditional internal combustion engines (ICE) have unique advantages and today make more than 99 % of the global fleet. Based on the analysis, a scheme of a hybrid power plant (HPP) was formed, combining the components of engine units of electric vehicles and internal combustion engines. The main elements of installation and their layout in the car are described. A schematic diagram of transmission is presented, its components are listed and their operation is described. The HPP scheme was developed within the framework of the concept of a motor vehicle corresponding to the trends of modern automotive industry. At the same time, such cars provide the opportunity of sport driving experience, have good dynamic performance.

INFLUENCE OF TFE EXPLOITATION TEST CONDITIONS ON FRICTION AND WEAR OF POLYMER COMPOSITES

The creation of new composite self-lubricating polymer materials with the use of Armenian minerals, and the study of the filler influence on tribological processes and working parameters of tribojoints is an actual problem in machine and device building.The developed composites are characterized by increased wear resistance, improved strength characteristics, and a reduced coefficient of friction, which expands the range of possibilities of their application in modern friction units of machines.The processes of friction and wear of antifriction self-lubricating polymer materials are significantly determined by the phenomenon of friction transfer, which is an important aspect of the adhesion mechanism of polymer wear and plays a significant role in the mechanism of self-lubrication of metalpolymer friction pairs. The analysis of tribological tests of composite materials depending on test conditions is carried out. The tribological behavior of polyphenilene sulfide filled with molybdenum concentrate and polytetrafluoroethilene sliding against a steel counterface is investigated. The influence of the filler proportions, sliding speed and counterface roughness on the wear rate and coefficient of friction of the self-lubricating polymer-based composites has been studied. For this purpose pin-on-disk configuration and the design of experimental approach utilizing Taguchi’s orthogonal arrays are used, allowing to make a reasonable choice of composites with minimum wear.

AN EVALUATION OF VISUAL PRIVACY LEVEL IN RESIDENTIAL UNIT'S LAYOUTS IN KHARTOUM, SUDAN

Visual privacy is one of the vital aspects of Islamic house designs. This paper aimed to analyze the level of visual privacy in the layout of different residential apartment unit samples in Khartoum, Sudan based on Islamic values and Sudanese culture and how modern apartment unit designs respond to these needs. Models included four units from courtyard-villas and two units from apartment buildings. The architectural layout plans, spatial relation, functions, and space zoning were applied to assess the level of visual privacy of each unit. Findings showed that the courtyard-villas had a higher degree of privacy and cultural values, reflecting more of the Sudanese lifestyle than the apartment units, even though the design of the apartment units pays more attention to the nuclear family privacy. This study would assist designers in enhancing the visual privacy in apartment unit layouts by highlighting factors that diminish or enhance the visual privacy level to create appropriate designs for Sudanese Muslims and Muslims in general.

Information and communication technologies for intelligent control of ground unmanned multipur-pose vehicles

At present, there is a situation when the practice of creating modern devices, units and systems of ground unmanned vehicles (GUV) has preceded the theory of information analysis and synthesis of complex systems. Some existing solutions for the information support of the GUV need to be generalized, standardized and unified, the definition of new special requirements for the creation of computer systems and networks in transport should be made. Therefore, it is necessary and actual to develop information and communication technology for intelligent control of multi-purpose GUV. Goal. The purpose of the article is to develop information and communication technology for intelligent control of multi-purpose GUV, which work in conditions of intensive loads, difficult operating conditions, increased responsibility of mechanisms, resulting in reduced human losses and energy consumption, increased machine reliability and control accuracy. Methodology. The methodology of tasks is based on the use of a synergetic approach to the creation of information and communication technology for intelligent control of multi-purpose GUV, as the development of a systematic approach taking into account the adaptation and integration of the vehicle to transport infrastructure and/or rough terrain. The principles of synergetics underlie the construction of mechatronic systems – a combination in one unit of components of different technical nature (mechanical, electrical, computer), which adaptively interact with the external environment as a single functional and structural organism. The synergetic approach deals with phenomena and processes, as a result of which the system – as a whole – may have properties that none of the parts has. Results. The concept of intelligent control of multi-purpose GUV on the basis of artificial hybrid neuro-phase regulators with the use of cloud computing services and deep learning technology is proposed, substantiated and implemented, which allows to qualitatively increase the efficiency of both one vehicle and the transport system on the base combining a synergetic approach and evolutionary methods of learning multilayer artificial neural networks by objectively forming the architecture of these networks on the basis of learning functionalities and appropriate control objectives. Originality. Use of cloud computing services based on deep learning for intelligent control technology of GUV. Practical value. The proposed information and communication technology of intelligent control of multi-purpose GUV will significantly reduce energy consumption, psychophysical stress on crew members, as well as increase the accuracy of location.

STANDARDS OF MEDICAL CARE “INVASIVE CANDIDIASIS IN NEWBORNS”

Candida infection (candidiasis) is an important clinical problem in newborns who need treatment in modern intensive care units. Organ and/or systemic infections caused by these fungi are called invasive candidiasis (IC). Newborns are especially vulnerable to IC, and their incidence is 3-5 times higher than the corresponding rates in children or adults. Invasive fungal infections caused by Candida are the third most common late-onset infection in infants born with a birth weight &lt;1500 g. IC in newborns is associated with approximately 20% mortality, and about half of survivors have serious long- term neurological damage. In recent years, new data have been obtained on the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of IC in newborns, which has determined a change in treatment recommendations. Accordingly, the need arose to ensure the compliance of our clinical practice with modern evidence-based approaches. Early diagnosis of candidiasis and prompt treatment with effective antifungal agents such as fluconazole, amphotericin B, and micafungin, when indicated, are critical to improving outcomes.

Development of a hardware-accelerated simulation kernel for ultra-high vacuum with Nvidia RTX GPUs

Molflow+ is a Monte Carlo (MC) simulation software for ultra-high vacuum, mainly used to simulate pressure in particle accelerators. In this article, we present and discuss the design choices arising in a new implementation of its ray-tracing–based simulation unit for Nvidia RTX Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). The GPU simulation kernel was designed with Nvidia’s OptiX 7 API to make use of modern hardware-accelerated ray-tracing units, found in recent RTX series GPUs based on the Turing and Ampere architectures. Even with the challenges posed by switching to 32 bit computations, our kernel runs much faster than on comparable CPUs at the expense of a marginal drop in calculation precision.

Sustainable Urban Agriculture as Functional Hybrid Unit—Issues of Urban Resilience

The aim of the research is to present a review of urban agriculture as synergic green and blue infrastructure solutions and to evaluate modern hybrid units with biomass and food production, and water retention in urbanized areas. The synergy between technologies of biomass production and water reuse provides the basis for the idea of self-sufficient urban units and sustainable agriculture. The research work defines the criteria and typology for urban resilience solutions. The analyses concern the correlation between production, management, retention, and reuse of water as a part of solutions for the model of a sustainable urban agriculture system in a compact city. The obtained results describe typology for cultivation and production in the modern city. Creating a resilient city connected with requirements posed by civilization concern changes in functional and spatial structure of the compact city. The discussion is supplemented with conclusions to the issue of synergy in urban planning, architecture, and engineering solutions. The article describes implementation technologies for city resilience in the context of agricultural production, energy and water management for the local community, and the ecosystem services in the city.

The Megopolis resampler: Memory coalesced resampling on GPUs

The resampling process employed in widely used methods such as Importance Sampling (IS), with its adaptive extension (AIS), are used to solve challenging problems requiring approximate inference; for example, non-linear, non-Gaussian state estimation problems. However, the re-sampling process can be computationally prohibitive for practical problems with real-time requirements. We consider the problem of developing highly parallelisable resampling algorithms for massively parallel hardware architectures of modern graphics processing units (GPUs) to accomplish real-time performance. We develop a new variant of the Metropolis algorithm—Megopolis—that improves performance without requiring a tuning parameter or reducing resampling quality. The Megopolis algorithm is built upon exploiting the memory access patterns of modern GPU units to reduce the number of memory transactions without the need for tuning parameters. Extensive numerical experiments on GPU hardware demonstrate that the proposed Megopolis algorithm is numerically stable and outperforms the original Metropolis algorithm and its variants—Metropolis-C1 and Metropolis-C2–in speed and quality metrics. Further, given the absence of open tools in this domain and facilitating fair comparisons in the future and supporting the signal processing community, we also open source the complete project, including a repository of source code with Megopolis and all other comparison methods.

Improving Attitude Estimation Using Gaussian-Process-Regression-Based Magnetic Field Maps.

Magnetometers measure the local magnetic field and are present in most modern inertial measurement units (IMUs). Readings from magnetometers are used to identify Earth’s Magnetic North outdoors, but are often ignored during indoor experiments since the magnetic field does not behave how most expect. This paper presents methods to create, validate, and visualize three-dimensional magnetic field maps to expand the use of magnetic fields as a sensing modality for navigation. The utility of these maps is measured in their ability to accurately represent the magnetic field and to enable dynamic attitude estimation. In experiments with motion capture truth data, a small multicopter with three-axis inertial measurements, including magnetometer, traversed five flight profiles distinctly exciting roll, pitch, and yaw motion to provide interesting trajectories for attitude estimation. Indoor experimental results were compared to those outdoors to emphasize how spatial variation in the magnetic field drives the need for our mapping techniques. Our work presents a new way of visualizing 3D magnetic fields, which allows users to better reason about the magnetic field in their workspace. Next, we show that magnetic field maps generated from coverage patterns are generally more accurate, but training such maps using observations from desired flight paths is sufficient in the vicinity of these paths. All training sets were interpolated using Gaussian process regression (GPR), which yielded maps with <1 T of error when interpolating between and extrapolating outside of observed locations. Finally, we validated the utility of our GPR-based maps in enabling attitude estimates in regions of high magnetic field spatial variation with experimental data.

Completing of modern energy-saving machine-tractor units

Labor productivity and crop production of a high quality directly depend on its equipment with the most advanced energy-rich machinery and the use of modern resource-saving technologies. Today, despite the difficult financial situation of agricultural enterprises, their technological infrastructure is implemented without necessary scientific justification, most often at the discretion of particular specialists or for other reasons, but without calculating the optimal composition and structure of the machine-tractor fleet. The units are completed according to the seller and manufacturer recommendations, relying only on the technical characteristics of the tractor and agricultural machine. The article focuses on the problem of completing machine-tractor aggregates, consisting of modern tractors and agricultural machines of domestic and foreign production, which are technically based production rates. For these units, a methodology for their completing, using the potential tractor thrust characteristics, has been developed. A graphic-analytical method for determining the technically based machine production rates is proposed.

Dose Correlation of Panax ginseng and Atractylodes macrocephala Koidz. Drug Pairs in the Chinese Medicine Prescription Based on the Copula Function.

ObjectivePanax ginseng and Atractylodes macrocephala Koidz. (AMK) are widely used in treating various diseases; however, research is insufficient on measuring the relationship that exists by combining this drug pair using the copula function. Methods In this study, 279 traditional Chinese medicine prescriptions containing the Panax ginseng and AMK drug pair were extracted from the prescription database for three types of screened indications, namely, diabetes mellitus, diarrhea, and insomnia. Following the principle of dose conversion, each dynasty unit was uniformly converted into a modern unit. Then, the kernel density distribution of Panax ginseng and AMK was fitted with their empirical distribution functions. Finally, the optimal copula function was selected from the copula function family as a t-copula function. Results The empirical distribution and probability density functions of Panax ginseng and AMK were obtained. From the results, their Kendall rank correlation coefficients with indications of diabetes mellitus, insomnia, and diarrhea were 0.8689, 0.7858, and 0.7403, whereas their Spearman rank correlation coefficients were 0.9563, 0.9276, and 0.8958. Results also indicated that the use of the t-copula function can better reflect the correlation between Panax ginseng and AMK doses. Conclusion From the three indications, the dose between Panax ginseng and AMK was positively correlated. This study, therefore, confirms the medicinal principle of Chinese medicine “combining” from the perspective of mathematical statistics. Results from this study are practical to evaluate the correlation between the drug pair doses, Panax ginseng and AMK, using the copula function model, which provides a new model for the scientific explanation of compatibility for Chinese medicines. This study also provides a methodological basis for more drug measurement studies and clinical medications.