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The stage of diagnosis is essential in terms of both the choice of the most adequate treatment policy and the monitoring of human responses to various environmental factors, including living and working conditions, conflicts, predisposition to some diseases, etc. To develop new non-invasive automatic procedures that assess the body's condition during minimum interventions into vital functions is of great scientific and practical value. The gas-discharge visualization method is a promising direction in the construction of these procedures.

Orthotopic liver transplantation (OLTx) in the presence of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) has been complicated by high recurrence rates. The ability to determine the risk and timing of HCC recurrence on an individual basis would greatly aid in the candidate selection process resulting in a more efficient use of donated organs and allow the individualization and better evaluation of adjuvant chemotherapy. The 214 patients who underwent OLTx in the presence of HCC were analyzed. From the 178 patients who survived more than 150 days, 71 (40%) have suffered HCC recurrence. Based on five risk factors, that is, gender, tumor number, lobar tumor distribution, tumor size, grade of vascular invasion, artificial neural network models predicting the likelihood of HCC recurrence within 1, 2, and 3 consecutive years after transplantation were developed. Based on model predictions, those combinations of risk factors that should/should not lead to recurrence were generated, allowing stratification of patients into the following three groups: 1) patients who should not suffer HCC recurrence and who should not need adjuvant therapy, 2) patients who will suffer recurrence and for whom postoperative chemotherapy significantly prolonged survival (but did not prevent recurrence), and 3) patients who may or may not suffer HCC recurrence and whose recurrence may be prevented by adjuvant chemotherapy. The outcome of OLTx for patients with HCC can be prognosticated based on a number of clinical variables. If verified through multicenter trials, these models could be made available to transplantation programs performing OLTx in the presence of HCC.

The paper considers models of homeostatic methods and their realizing biotechnological complex, which are designed for examining the joint activities of a group of specialists, training action-coordinating skills, and revealing relations within the group. The approach described in the paper allows the models to be improved without any difficulty, making them meet the users' requirements.

Electronic image synthesizers and imagers with colour CRT's offer a considerable scope for the study of the visual system. However, the synthesis of optimum bioengineering systems assumes a number of requirements for ophthalmic devices should be fulfilled. Such requirements have been induced in general and particular technical principles of designing ophthalmic devices.