Background: We examined survival and time until recurrence of disease by multivariant analysis in patients treated for papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC). Patients and Methods: In the period from January 2003 to January 2018, we analyzed 102 patients with PTC in Public Health Institution–Hospital “Sveti Vracevi” in Bijeljina. Survival and time until recurrence of the disease were analyzed using patients’ general data and factors based on preoperative, intraoperative and postoperative examinations. Many prognostic factors were analyzed together; the AGES prognostic score, consisting of age, grade, extent and size, and the AMES prognostic score, consisting of age, metastases, extent and size. Results: We analyzed 102 patients with PTC. Out of these 87 patients had AGES p.s ≤ 3.99 and 15 patients had AGES p.s> 4. The survival of patients was affected by the presence of distant metastases at the time of diagnosis p = 0.00109 and age p = 0.0436. Recurrence of the disease was recorded in 14 patients. Most patients had recurrence of the disease in the first 5 years after initial surgery. Analyzing the time until recurrence, we concluded that, statistically speaking, AGES p.s> 4 affect recurrence of the disease p = 0.0355 in a significant way, while distant metastases affect it in a very significant way (p = 0.008). Conclusions: Prognostic factors of papillary thyroid carcinoma can be divided into 4 categories, patients’ general data and factors based on preoperative, intraoperative and postoperative examinations.

This paper describes method for lightning current waveform parameters estimation from direct current measurements on remote lightning monitoring system. Proposed signal enhancemed method is based on segmentational multi-step digital signal enhancement in time domain. Performance of proposed waveform parameter estimation has been confirmed in Monte Carlo simulation of three types of synthetic signals corrupted with different levels of additive Gaussian white noise. The proposed approach for noise reduction in time domain offers satisfactory results.

The paper presents the analytics of lightning data collected by monitoring system in real - time for the measurement of the direct lightning current (LAMS) and the lightning location system (LINET). The both systems and their operation mode are shortly described. A great number of collected data are analyzed, explained and compared. The data analyses showed the Lovćen mountain has the overall highest number of registered lightning strokes in the whole analyzed area.

This paper describes a detailed transmission line model for a transient analysis. Line surge arrester energy sharing and importance of complete transmission line modelling is explained. Lightning channel impedance and tower footing resistance are important parameters that influence line surge arrester energy duty. Therefore, energy stresses of transmission line surge arresters due to different values of lightning channel impedance and nonuniform distribution of tower footing resistance are considered.

This paper is dedicated to transient studies on wind turbine blade due to different types of lightning discharges. In order to select the appropriate lightning protection system, it is necessary to identify the parameters of lightning flash. Therefore, measured lightning flashes are presented and analyzed. Simulations have been conducted in EMTP - RV. In the case when lightning hits the blade of wind turbine transient voltage on tower top, voltages on tower footing resistance and on primary side of transformer are considered.

In this paper Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) for a large scale multirotor systems (with moving mass) based on novel system for aircraft control will be presented. This system uses four petrol engines for lift and a moving mass system to control the vehicle. Analysis presented in this paper assesses the vulnerabilities of the system during the vehicle operation. The main objective of the analysis is to understand the cause and severity of the failures that can occur to the petrol engines and the moving mass system. Our unmanned aerial vehicle system is used for environmental monitoring and maritime security developed under MORUS project funded under NATO SPS Program. The ultimate goal of our research and design is to make an unmanned aerial vehicle that can lift larger amount of load (approximately 40kg). During its operation time the unmanned aerial vehicle might fail to complete a certain assignment so failure mode and effects analysis is needed to account for such problems and to find appropriate activities to reduce the overall risk the system faces during the mission.

Introduction: Heart failure (HF) has very high rate of repeat hospitalizations due to HF decompensation (HHFD), sometimes very shortly after discharge for acute HF. Aim: The aim of this paper is to investigate rate of HHFD and to identify their possible predictors. Patients and Methods: Total amount of 222 patients hospitalized at Clinic for heart and vessel disease and rheumatism in acute HF were followed for next 18 months for occurrence of HHFD. During hospitalization were collected demographic data, risk factors, routine laboratory tests and admission BNP (brain natriuretic peptide), discharge BNP, percentage change of BNP during hospitalization, high sensitive troponin I, CA125 (cancer antigen125) and cystatin C. Results: In next 18 months 129 patients (58.11%) reached end-point HHFD- mean time of its occurrence was 2.2 (95% CI=1.67-2.7) months. Patients with HHFD had more often arterial hypertension (HTA) (p=0.006), had higher BMI (p=0.035) and had higher values of bilirubin, admission BNP (p=0.031), discharge BNP (p <0.001), CA125 (p=0.023) and cystatin C (p=0.028). There was no difference in troponin values (p=0.095), while % reduction of BNP during hospitalization was lower (p<0.001) in group with HHFD. In univariate Cox hazard analysis HTA was positively and BMI negatively correlated with HHFD, while in multivariate Cox hazard analysis independent predictors were HTA (HR 1.6; 95% CI=1.1-2.2; p=0.018) and BMI<25 (HR 1.6; 95% CI=1.1-2.3; p=0.007). In univariate Cox hazard analysis admission BNP, discharge BNP, rise of BNP during hospitalization, CA125 and bilirubin were positively correlated, while sodium was negatively correlated with HHFD. In multivariate Cox hazard analysis there was only one independent predictor of HHFD - discharge BNP (HR 6.05; 95% CI=1.89-19.4; p=0.002). Conclusion: Arterial hypertension, BMI>25 and discharge BNP are independent predictors of HHFD. This could help us to identify high-risk patients for readmission who should be monitored more frequently and treated with sophisticated drug and device therapy.

The power system (PS) evolves with the introduction of new technologies in the sectors of production, transmission, distribution and control of electricity consumption. The philosophy of PS control, operation and management is changing. The public low-voltage network (LVN) faces the major changes due to integration of new smart grid technologies. The integration of photovoltaic power plants (PVPPs) and Energy Storage System (ESS) in LVN is a focus of this paper. Three scenarios are considered: (1) analysis of LVN without PVPPs and ESS, (2) analysis of LVN with PVPPs, where LVN is treated as energy storage (ES), (3) analysis of LVN with PVPPs and ESS. The novel algorithm for ESS control aiming to peak load reduction is presented in the paper. Losses and voltage conditions are analyzed on all LVN buses. The slow voltage variations analysis is carried out according to the EN50160 standard. It was shown that the connection of the ESS has negligible impact on losses in LVN. Slow voltage variations are within limits defined by standard EN50160 for all considered scenarios.

Pushing is a common task in robotic scenarios. In real-world environments, robots need to manipulate various unknown objects without previous experience. We propose a data-driven approach for learning local inverse models of robot-object interaction for push manipulation. The robot makes observations of the object behaviour on the fly and adapts its movement direction. The proposed model is probabilistic, and we update it using maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation. We test our method by pushing objects with a holonomic mobile robot base. Validation of results over a diverse object set demonstrates a high degree of robustness and a high success rate in pushing objects towards a fixed target and along a path compared to previous methods. Moreover, based on learned inverse models, the robot can learn object properties and distinguish between different object behaviours when they are pushed from different sides.

Introduction: Population aging increases the number of people with dementia. Dementia is a set of symptoms that include memory difficulties, learning difficulties, speech and language difficulties, disorientation in time and space, difficulties in understanding and behavioral changes. Dementia is not part of natural aging and needs to be understood as such and have to be recognized at time to provide adequate support for people with dementia. Aim: To present the importance of communication: To present communication difficulties which are the result of dementia; To present adaptations in the way of communicating with people with dementia. Material and methods: The article has a descriptive character, and represents a review of the literature dealing with this topic. Results: Difficulties in area of language are a common symptom in people with dementia. Those communication difficulties are a consequence of nerve cell failure, and person with dementia should not be blamed of the symptoms that arise. People with dementia show lower results in the area of understanding and verbal expression, repetition, reading and writing. Syntax and phonology remain relatively intact in early stages, but semantic abilities are impaired. Conclusion: Communication for people with dementia and with people with dementia for all persons involved in care (including family members, medical staff and therapists, and members of the community) can be very challenging. It is often necessary to adapt the way of communication to avoid stress and negative feelings in a person with dementia. As the disease causing dementia progresses, communication problems are increasing as well. Many times caregivers and therapists are in situations where their communicative behavior (verbal, but also nonverbal) needs to show support, compassion, care, and desire to help.

Multi-, many-core, hybrid processors and parallel programming languages are slowly becoming pervasive in main- stream computing. It is expected that they will affect a large spectrum of systems, from embedded and general-purpose, to high-end computing systems. This architectural change has already challenged programmers to efficiently write an application code that can scale over many cores to utilize its computational power. Moreover, many heterogeneous architectures exist today, hence there was an emergent need for a uniform interface to these architectures. Recently, Khronos Group defined the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) for abstracting the underlying hardware, which enables software developers to write a portable code across different shared-memory architectures. In this paper, we introduce a new parallel implementation of one of the fastest image segmentation algorithms known as Simple Linear Iterative Clustering based on OpenCL. We evaluate the effectiveness of this implementation using only multi-core GPCPU. Our implementation is fully compatible with sequential implementation. When the algorithm is executed sequentially it utilizes only 25% of total computational power of a GPCPU for any image resolution, while its modified algorithm is able to utilize close to 100% for high resolution images. The resulting algorithm is up to 5×faster than its sequential counterpart.

Driven by higher energy demand, the complications of finding new corridors, construction, and slow commissioning procedures for transmission lines, an advanced technology has been innovated to adapt to the modern power system's needs. A new type of overhead conductor with a polymer composite core (ACCC) have a greater ampacity, lower sag, and are lighter than traditional ACSR conductors. Therefore, it is this innovative technology is optimal choice when the decommissioning of old lines takes place. This paper analyzes the impact of the gradual replacement of old transmission lines with all the benefits and disadvantages. It addresses the issues of equipment aging and proposes a replacement strategy for a cost-effective transition to a modernized power system functioning at improved performance. Calculations and analyses are performed on a real interconnected system, composed of several South East European (SEE) transmission grids.

For interconnected and complex systems, security is paramount for establishing trust in their correctness and design adequacy. Thus, security needs to be assured and a corresponding security assurance case needs to be presented to system stakeholders, security assessors, as well as to system users. However, security is dynamic by its nature and to maintain its acceptable security level, frequent updates might be required. Traditionally, a security assurance case is built from scratch whenever a change occurs, however given the cost of resources needed for such a task, a more effective and less time consuming way of handling updates is needed. Hence, the challenge of security case run-time adaptation is considered in this work. We survey the state of the art in security assurance and security case development to refine the challenge and identify system decomposition as one the enablers for security case run-time adaptation. We propose to apply system decomposition in terms of services and use service choreographies to facilitate security case run-time adaptation. The proposed approach is illustrated on an E-gas example.