Kristian Soltesz’s research while affiliated with Lund University and other places

Over the last century, many women have contributed to the field of control engineering. Nevertheless, women are generally in the minority. This article highlights the contribution of women since the inception of control engineering to highlight good exemples to coming generations. A repository of portraits of women in control engineering is currently being curated and made available through the website of Lund University. The main purpose is to provide role models for future generations of control engineers. This article describes the need for role models as a means to change the situation and attract more women to control engineering in the future. Two portraits in the repository – those of Irmgard Flügge-Lotz and Nina Thornhill – are presented here. Ideas on how to use this resource are provided.

Case isolation, that is, detection and isolation of infected individuals in order to prevent spread, is a strategy to curb infectious disease epidemics. Here, we study the efficiency of a case isolation strategy subject to time delays in terms of its ability to stabilize the epidemic spread in heterogeneous contact networks. For an SIR epidemic model, we characterize the stability boundary analytically and show how it depends on the time delay between infection and isolation as well as the heterogeneity of the inter-individual contact network, quantified by the variance in contact rates. We show that network heterogeneity accounts for a restricting correction factor to previously derived stability results for homogeneous SIR models (with uniform contact rates), which are therefore too optimistic on the relevant time scales. We illustrate the results and the underlying mechanisms through insightful numerical examples.

Background: Existing working heart models for ex vivo functional evaluation of donor hearts often use cardiac afterloads made up of discrete resistive and compliant elements. This approach limits the practicality of independently controlling systolic and diastolic aortic pressure to safely test the heart under multiple loading conditions. We present and investigate a novel afterload concept designed to enable such control. Methods: Six ∼70 kg pig hearts were evaluated in vivo, then ex vivo in left-ventricular working mode using the presented afterload. Both in vivo and ex vivo, the hearts were evaluated at two exertion levels: at rest and following a 20 ug adrenaline bolus, while measuring aortic pressure and flow, left ventricular pressure and volume, and left atrial pressure. Results: The afterload gave aortic pressure waveforms that matched the general shape of the in vivo measurements. A wide range of physiological systolic pressures (93 to 160 mmHg) and diastolic pressures (73 to 113 mmHg) were generated by the afterload. Conclusions: With the presented afterload concept, multiple physiological loading conditions could be tested ex vivo, and compared with the corresponding in vivo data. An additional control loop from the set pressure limits to the measured systolic and diastolic aortic pressure is proposed to address discrepancies observed between the set limits and the measured pressures.

We report on local nowcasting (short-term forecasting) of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) hospitalizations based on syndromic (symptom) data recorded in regular healthcare routines in Östergötland County (population ≈465,000), Sweden, early in the pandemic, when broad laboratory testing was unavailable. Daily nowcasts were supplied to the local healthcare management based on analyses of the time lag between telenursing calls with the chief complaints (cough by adult or fever by adult) and COVID-19 hospitalization. The complaint cough by adult showed satisfactory performance (Pearson correlation coefficient r>0.80; mean absolute percentage error <20%) in nowcasting the incidence of daily COVID-19 hospitalizations 14 days in advance until the incidence decreased to <1.5/100,000 population, whereas the corresponding performance for fever by adult was unsatisfactory. Our results support local nowcasting of hospitalizations on the basis of symptom data recorded in routine healthcare during the initial stage of a pandemic.