This article reports the conclusions of a consensus expert conference on the basic principles and nomenclature of renal replacement therapy (RRT) currently utilized to manage acute kidney injury (AKI). This multidisciplinary consensus conference discusses common definitions, components, techniques, and operations of the machines and platforms used to deliver extracorporeal therapies, utilizing a “machine-centric” rather than a “patient-centric” approach. We provide a detailed description of the performance characteristics of membranes, filters, transmembrane transport of solutes and fluid, flows, and methods of measurement of delivered treatment, focusing on continuous renal replacement therapies (CRRT) which are utilized in the management of critically ill patients with AKI. This is a consensus report on nomenclature harmonization for principles of extracorporeal renal replacement therapies. Devices and operations are classified and defined in detail to serve as guidelines for future use of terminology in papers and research.

This paper presents an experimental investigation of a bilateral generalized predictive controller for scaled teleoperation systems subject to slave force feedback, variable transmission-time delays, and packet losses. The originality of the approach proposed mainly lies in its capacity to take into account explicitly the slave force feedback in the predictive algorithm. Experimental results show the system stability with the proposed approach using a frequency-domain technique. Several configurations of scaling factors have been used; it is shown that the stability conditions strongly depend of the external environment. Another experimental result verify the robust performances of the approach in terms of tracking behavior with both strong variations of time delays and packet losses in the communication network. For the experimentations, the communication network is the Internet using user-datagram protocol, while the slave robot is a 6-DOF anthropomorphic robot with a force sensor.