Supervisory Algorithm for Autonomous Hemodynamic Management Systems

Future military conflicts will require new solutions to manage combat casualties. The use of automated medical systems can potentially address this need by streamlining and augmenting the delivery of medical care in both emergency and combat trauma environments. However, in many situations, these systems may need to operate in conjunction with other autonomous and semi-autonomous devices. Management of complex patients may require multiple automated systems operating simultaneously and potentially competing with each other. Supervisory controllers capable of harmonizing multiple closed-loop systems are thus essential before multiple automated medical systems can be deployed in managing complex medical situations. The objective for this study was to develop a Supervisory Algorithm for Casualty Management (SACM) that manages decisions and interplay between two automated systems designed for management of hemorrhage control and resuscitation: an automatic extremity tourniquet system and an adaptive resuscitation controller. SACM monitors the required physiological inputs for both systems and synchronizes each respective system as needed. We present a series of trauma experiments carried out in a physiologically relevant benchtop circulatory system in which SACM must recognize extremity or internal hemorrhage, activate the corresponding algorithm to apply a tourniquet, and then resuscitate back to the target pressure setpoint. SACM continues monitoring after the initial stabilization so that additional medical changes can be quickly identified and addressed, essential to extending automation algorithms past initial trauma resuscitation into extended monitoring. Overall, SACM is an important step in transitioning automated medical systems into emergency and combat trauma situations. Future work will address further interplay between these systems and integrate additional medical systems.

Personal Digital Health Assistants

Personal Digital Health Assistants (PDHA) are applications that can run on virtually any computer or mobile device including a smart phone/ personal digital assistant (PDA). A PDHA acquires, stores, and analyzes health related information of an individual. It usually communicates with remote servers of a large organization which can connect it to various resources. PDHAs are an integral part of telehealth. Their utility has increased manyfold since the start of the pandemic. The systems are increasingly more complex and are involved in all aspects of care. The PDHA are usually utilized by patients or their caregivers with assistance from professionals. Many automated systems can be utilized free of charge. Some are available as part of a prepaid health plan.

Rule by Automation: How Automated Decision Systems Promote Freedom and Equality

Using automated systems to avoid the need for human discretion in government contexts – a scenario we call ‘rule by automation’ – can help us achieve the ideal of a free and equal society. Drawing on relational theories of freedom and equality, we explain how rule by automation is a more complete realization of the rule of law and why thinkers in these traditions have strong reasons to support it. Relational theories are based on the absence of human domination and hierarchy, which automation helps us achieve. Nevertheless, there is another understanding of relational theories where what matters is the presence of valuable relationships with those in power. Exploring this further might help us see when and why we should accept human discretion.

Supervised Learning Methods and Applications in Medical Research

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods are transforming many commercial and academic areas, including feature extraction, autonomous driving, computational linguistics, and voice recognition. These new technologies are now having a significant effect in radiography, forensics, and many other areas where the accessibility of automated systems may improve the precision and repeatability of essential job performance. In this systematic review, we begin by providing a short overview of the different methods that are currently being developed, with a particular emphasis on those utilized in biomedical studies.

Image quality assessment

Quality assessment is an integral stage in the processing and analysis of digital images in various automated systems. With the increase in the number and variety of devices that allow receiving data in various digital formats, as well as the expansion of human activities in which information technology (IT) is used, the need to assess the quality of the data obtained is growing. As well as the bar grows for the requirements for their quality.The article describes the factors that deteriorate the quality of digital images, areas of application of image quality assessment functions, a method for normalizing proximity measures, classes of digital images and their possible distortions, image databases available on the Internet for conducting experiments on assessing image quality with visual assessments of experts.

Packaging research artefacts with RO-Crate

An increasing number of researchers support reproducibility by including pointers to and descriptions of datasets, software and methods in their publications. However, scientific articles may be ambiguous, incomplete and difficult to process by automated systems. In this paper we introduce RO-Crate, an open, community-driven, and lightweight approach to packaging research artefacts along with their metadata in a machine readable manner. RO-Crate is based on Schema.org annotations in JSON-LD, aiming to establish best practices to formally describe metadata in an accessible and practical way for their use in a wide variety of situations. An RO-Crate is a structured archive of all the items that contributed to a research outcome, including their identifiers, provenance, relations and annotations. As a general purpose packaging approach for data and their metadata, RO-Crate is used across multiple areas, including bioinformatics, digital humanities and regulatory sciences. By applying “just enough” Linked Data standards, RO-Crate simplifies the process of making research outputs FAIR while also enhancing research reproducibility. An RO-Crate for this article11 https://w3id.org/ro/doi/10.5281/zenodo.5146227 is archived at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5146227.

Information systems in geotechnics

The article considers the information modeling of buildings together with the foundation within the information system and the stages of its implementation. The workflow for building a 3D geotechnical model includes surface relief data, field and laboratory test data, soil lithology, geometric characteristics of the foundation structure and load. Automated systems with processing and interpretation of test data are used to determine the characteristics of soils. Mathematical modeling of the behavior of the foundations of the foundations with various input data is performed using analytical solutions and numerical methods. The natural heterogeneity of soil properties and its impact on the behavior of buildings is estimated by the sensitivity indicator of the foundation-foundation system by introducing virtual workings between the existing normative ones and the subsequent calculation of the precipitation and roll of the foundation.

Ethics, Health, and AI in a COVID-19 World

One of the conversations that emerged forcefully during the past year, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, is linked to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare, and it touches both its effectiveness and its ethics. The chapter starts with three examples of using automated systems in healthcare and continues by proposing an understanding of the ethics from the perspective of the meaning assigned to optimisation. The argument is that we need to deeply explore the aim of optimisation in order to shed a different and perhaps more revealing light on ethical questions related to AI use in general, and in healthcare in particular. The chapter ends with a few propositions on how to approach optimisation and reconsider the way in which automation is both adopted and adapted.