At the championship held in Molveno, Italy, participants swam distances ranging from 50 to 1,000 meters in water temperatures as low as 2°C without wetsuits.

“Ice swimming has become a new stage for me: previously I trained in classical swimming and earned the title of Master of Sports of Russia. This year I made my debut in winter swimming and immediately competed at the European Championship. The preparation required not only physical endurance but also serious psychological readiness. I’m glad I was able to achieve a достойный result and become a medalist. In the future, I plan to continue my training and aim to take part in the 2027 Ice Swimming World Championship, which will be held in Argentina,” Matvey Ovseychuk shared.

In addition to competing in classical swimming events, the athlete regularly takes part in open water competitions, where he has repeatedly become a winner and medalist, as well as in winter and ice swimming tournaments. Alongside his studies, he works as a swimming coach.

Held since 1977, the ICPC is considered one of the largest and most respected team-based programming competitions. Every year, thousands of students from leading universities around the globe take part, competing to solve complex algorithmic problems under strict time constraints. The contest challenges participants not only to possess deep knowledge of algorithms and data structures, but also to analyze problem statements quickly, find unconventional solutions, and manage time effectively within a team. Tasks involve working with large datasets, geometric and probabilistic models, as well as interactive problem formats.

Following the results of the championship, the Fiksiki team (Ivan Maksimov, Ivan Skobelev, and Andrey Shalimov) was awarded a second-degree diploma. The students placed 39th out of 303 teams in the Northern Eurasia region, securing a strong position in the upper tier of the rankings.

The NoName team (Biliktо Dorzhiev, Ivan Brechkin, and Daniil Ananyev) represented MISIS at the ICPC semifinal for the first time. For their performance, the team received a third-degree diploma.

Student preparation for competitions is carried out within the ACM MISIS association, which has been promoting competitive programming at the university since 2009. The association helps students develop teamwork skills, algorithmic thinking, and experience in participating in international tournaments.

T1 Hackathons are a series of intellectual competitions focused on creating breakthrough solutions. Team MISIS MOJARUNG—Kirill Veriyalov, Albert Khramov, and Alexey Koshelev—won the “VibeCode Jam: The Interview of the Future” track. Participants were tasked with developing an AI platform for conducting technical interviews with a virtual interviewer. The team’s solution covers the entire interview cycle, from generating adaptive algorithmic challenges to producing a detailed candidate report. The AI interviewer handles all stages of the interview, while the platform also includes job listings and résumé sections.

Second place in the same track went to Daniil Ananyev, Timur Khamidullin, Artur Arakelyan, and Alan Khalibekov from team YSL MISIS, who developed the VibeCode ecosystem for technical interviews. The platform combines a browser-based coding environment, an AI interviewer, automated solution evaluation, résumé analysis, and the creation of a candidate skills map.

In the “Self-Deploy: CI/CD Without DevOps” track, third place was awarded to team larek.tech. They developed a command-line tool, larek cli, which automatically analyzes a project’s code repository structure, generates a configuration file, and launches a pipeline that builds, tests, and runs the project on the GitLab platform. Experts particularly noted the support for monorepositories—a rare and technically challenging feature for solutions of this kind. Instead of keeping each project in separate folders maintained by different people, all projects are stored in a single large repository, allowing the team to manage them collectively. NUST MISIS was represented by students Vasily Tarasov and Evgeny Gurov.

Team preparation for programming competitions and support for the development of the university’s IT communities is provided by the NUST MISIS Center for Technological Competitions and Olympiads. Since 2021, student teams have won more than 38 million rubles, securing 264 prize places across 143 hackathons.

At the IT-and-film-focused Wink AI Challenge hackathon, participants were tasked with developing solutions that speed up the production of films and TV series through applied AI technologies. Alexander Krylov, Saveliy Blokhin, and Nikita Meshcheryakov from the MISIS x MISIS x MISIS team competed in the track “Platform for Automated Script Analysis and Structuring.” They developed a service that processes Russian-language scripts and generates a structured table of scenes, indicating locations, time of day, characters, and other parameters.

“We analyzed ten of the most widely used models in the world and selected a solution that combines high response quality with a lightweight architecture. Our service already includes groundwork for the rapid integration of solutions from the second track, script previsualization. The result was made possible by strong teamwork, each participant’s experience in similar projects, and strict adherence to deadlines,” said Alexander Krylov.

Moscow also hosted Russia’s first interdisciplinary hackathon Theatre. AI. Human, dedicated to the use of artificial intelligence in theatre arts. Second place was awarded to the MISIS team “3+5,” which developed a digital twin of a theatre, a system for tracking actors and props using computer vision and UWB trackers. The solution simplifies the documentation of performances and opens up new opportunities for their digital archiving. NUST MISIS was represented by Semyon Zhidkov, Gennady Alkheev, and Boris Kuznechik.

Third place went to the team “2+16,” which included four MISIS students: Ekaterina Mukhortova, Varvara Popadyina, Dmitry Anikiev, and Yakov Boyarshinov. They worked on the project GrimAI, a web platform for makeup artists that creates digital sketches of stage looks tailored to a specific actor and scene in just seconds. Theatre expertise for the projects was provided by students of GITIS.

Team preparation for programming competitions and support for the development of the university’s IT communities are handled by the Center for Technological Competitions and Olympiads at NUST MISIS. Since 2021, student teams have won more than 35 million rubles, securing 248 prize-winning places across 134 hackathons.

The first day began with an opening ceremony at the NUST MISIS Innovation Birth Point, followed by an educational program and a networking session for the participants.

Olga Petrova, Deputy Minister of Education and Science of Russia, delivered a welcome speech: “NUST MISIS is part of the top group of leaders in the ‘Priority-2030’ program. It is a leading university not only in the country but also in the world, and this is the result of significant work. Thanks to Alevtina Chernikova for creating a unique space of opportunities for the development of students and staff, based on a human-centered model. I am very grateful for the support of the StudRussia initiative.”

“MISIS University hosts students from 85 countries. The university’s mission is to create conditions for high-quality education, immersion in research activities, and the discovery of each student’s personal potential” Alevtina Chernikova, Rector of NITU MISIS.

At the lecture organized by the Knowledge Society, Maria Zakharova, Director of the Department of Information and Press at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, spoke about the core values of Russian society.

The participants then moved on to the live challenges: solving practical tasks and defending their solutions in front of the jury. Experts evaluated the participants’ professional competencies, leadership skills, ability to self-present, and creative thinking.

At the awards ceremony, the winners in six categories across two tracks were announced, in Russian and English.

Winners of the Russian-language track:

• “Good Without Borders” — Olim Kadyrov, Kazan State Power Engineering University

• “Inspired by Creativity” — Reza Dezaipur, St. Petersburg State Institute of Culture

• “Leader of the Generation” — Ksenia Kozlyuk, Samara State Agrarian University

• “Conquerors of Heights” — Elina Anikina, Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University

• “Future of Science” — Sevara Zhalmaganbetova, Kazan State Power Engineering University

• “Russian Language and Culture” — Sharaf El-Din Shikhon, National Research Mordovia State University

Winners of the English-language track:

• “Good Without Borders” — Michael Blessing Olado, ITMO University

• “Inspired by Creativity” — Giselle Sarahi Vergara Herrera, HSE University-St Petersburg

• “Leader of the Generation” — Hugo Alexander Garson Navarrete, St. Petersburg State University

• “Conquerors of Heights” — Mohammed Parvez Sheikh, Samara State Medical University

• “Future of Science” — Darshini Malaviya, Krasnoyarsk State Medical University

• “Russian Language and Culture” — Sundar Raj Philominal Manchika Martin, Stavropol State Medical University

The ICPC World Finals have been held since 1977. It is one of the most prestigious and large-scale team competitions in competitive programming, where the world’s best students face off each year. The challenge is to solve algorithmic problems of varying complexity within a limited time, writing efficient code while minimizing errors and incorrect attempts.

Head of ACM MISIS Dmitry Popov: “I’m very proud that the guys gave it their all this season and made it to the finals. We’ve been on this journey together for six years, since they first entered university and decided to try competitive programming. Along the way, we celebrated many victories at prestigious competitions, and their skill level kept rising year after year. I’m proud they managed to repeat their best result and once again rank among the world’s top 100 teams. Now it’s time for new students to aim for the same achievements, and we’ll do everything possible to help them succeed.”

322team, made up of Evgeny Kolodin, Mikhail Tagiltsev, and Andrejs Akmanov, has been training with ACM MISIS since their freshman year. They have won and placed at the Open All-Siberian Olympiad, RuCode, Federation of Competitive Programming tournaments, and other prestigious contests. This was their second time reaching the ICPC finals and securing a spot in the top 100.

The NUST MISIS Center for Technology Competitions and Olympiads supports students in preparing for and participating in IT competitions. Open courses offered by the ACM MISIS programming section help students deepen their knowledge of algorithms and data structures. These skills prove invaluable not only in competitions but also in their future careers.

In 2025, the “Battle of Robots” championship received 306 applications from Russia, India, Belarus, Brazil, China, Pakistan, Tunisia, Bangladesh, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia. A total of 112 teams were admitted to the tournament. A distinctive feature of this year’s competition was the opportunity to watch the battles from all sides — in 360-degree format.

The participants included both professional engineers and students from leading technical universities. The MISIS—RTC BlackOut team demonstrated a high level of expertise in the weight category up to 110 kg with their robot “Legend No. 17” and advanced to the championship final, where the strongest teams from Moscow, Voronezh, Kazan, St. Petersburg, and Tehran (Iran) will compete.

Team captain Anastasia Khalimova, a MISIS student, noted: “Our robot is the result of friendship, knowledge, and support: the MISIS Student Design Bureau team manages to combine studies with real engineering projects thanks to the constant guidance of university professors and the staff of the Kinetika Engineering Center. Our projects are getting stronger every year! Special thanks to our partners from RTC for helping us improve ‘Legend No. 17’.”

The “Battle of Robots” is an international championship where developer teams from different countries control their robots in spectacular battles. Since 2023, the tournament has been held annually under the coordination of the Ministry of Digital Development of Russia. This year, it was organized by “Engineers and Robots”.

This year, participants from 11 countries across the CIS, Asia, Africa, and Latin America took part in the competition. They were tasked with creating videos on relevant topics of interest to them. The works were evaluated by winners of the Russian “TOP-blog” competition, authors of youth blogs, and media experts.

Akintobi Tosin won in the category “Discover Russia.” Other categories included “A Day of a Nuclear Student’ Life”, “Best Blogger”, and the Audience Choice Award. Akintobi Tosin also won a special nomination from the NTV channel. He and other finalists will present their works at the major international festival “Unknown Russia”, and in 2025 they will attend the youth forum “Forsazh”.

“I would like to thank my university, NUST MISIS, for the opportunity to represent it, as well as the organizers of YouRussia for the wonderful privilege to share my story about what I have achieved in this beautiful country so far,” noted Akintobi.

The YouRussia competition aims to introduce foreign students to the culture and traditions of the peoples of the Russian Federation and to create a multilingual space. The final of the international YouRussia competition took place on December 6 in Obninsk (Kaluga region) as part of the festival “All Flags Will Come to Us”.

The “Consortium of Foundation Universities of the State Corporation “Rosatom” is a community of higher educational institutions created to coordinate activities in the interests of the nuclear industry in higher, postgraduate, and additional professional education, as well as in the scientific field. The Consortium includes 20 specialized universities.

The community forum for young specialists “Forsazh” has been held in the Kaluga region since 2011. The event is organized by the MAKO Association of Citizens and Organizations for the Promotion of Corporate Education with support from the Ministry of Energy of the Russian Federation, the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation, and the Russian Society “Knowledge”. The goal is to familiarize participants with the best practices of the Russian engineering school, teach teamwork practices and technologies, and work with communication and digital knowledge management tools.

With the growing volume of data, there is a need for more reliable neural networks that can not only classify new objects but also recognize technical artifacts that inevitably arise during image acquisition. This unknown information is collectively referred to as out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Human factors in detecting OOD data can lead to undesirable consequences. The creators of this algorithm addressed this challenge by diversifying the ensemble model, which reduced correlations among inputs and improved the system’s overall accuracy.

The SDDE ensemble neural network consists of several models, each trained on subsets of distinct datasets. This approach allows each model to focus on unique image features by diversifying the attention maps of each model—a concept that helps interpret where the neural network “looks.” As a result, the ensemble becomes more diverse, enabling the network to identify objects in images with minimal error. To assess the network’s effectiveness, researchers tested it on various datasets: CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and ImageNet-1K. The SDDE ensemble neural network demonstrated superior results compared to similar algorithms, such as Negative Correlation Learning and Adaptive Diversity Promoting.

“One of the most critical tasks in developing machine learning models is aligning real probabilities with those predicted by the neural network. In other words, the network should be confident in its predictions to the extent that it accurately reflects the ease of predicting the target for a given sample. Typically, networks show no hesitation in their predictions. In this study, we proposed a new ensemble diversification method based on logits—the values the network outputs before converting them into probabilities. This innovation has improved the network’s ‘confidence’ when detecting out-of-distribution data, which is crucial for real-world applications. For instance, autonomous driving requires the network to identify objects on the road accurately to prevent accidents. In medical diagnostics, extensive databases are essential for accurate diagnoses. Uncalibrated models can be overly confident in their incorrect assumptions, but our network lacks this excessive confidence, enabling it to assess its calculations more realistically,” Maxim Zhdanov, a third-year student at the MISIS Institute of Computer Science.

To improve the detection of noise artifacts, the researchers used an Outlier Exposure approach, training the model on specialized datasets containing examples of OOD data.

Previously, scientists from MISIS University and HSE University introduced a new neural network, LAPUSKA, which enhances image quality twice as fast as comparable products.

At the IROS-2024 conference, researchers and developers from around the world present their scientific papers, while companies showcase the best robots. This year, scientists from 60 countries submitted over 3,600 publications. At the event, NUST MISIS students and graduates Georgiy Bondar, Andrey Korigodsky, Matvey Urvantsov, and Artem Vasyunik discussed the creation of the art object in Novosibirsk from a technological perspective. The mural, applied to the facade using a unique drone and software, became the largest painted object on an architectural structure created by an autonomous flying drone. The scientific paper on this topic made it to the shortlist for the Best Entertainment and Amusement Papers award at the event.

“In July 2023, representatives from Universal University approached our team of developers. They proposed creating a drone to participate in the project intensive ‘Archipelago 2023’. The concept and the artwork were developed by contemporary artist Misha Most. Our tasks included designing the drone’s structure and software for applying the drawing on the wall of the sports complex at Novosibirsk State Technical University,” said Georgiy Bondar, the project’s operational director and head of the robotics club at NUST MISIS.

A year after Novosibirsk, at “Archipelago-2024” in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the team completed a new project and developed a technology for group flight to simultaneously draw with two drones. Later, they became speakers for a hands-on course titled “Programming an Artist Drone for Autonomous Image Application”, created by University 2035 and Universal University with support from the “Platform NTI”.

Earlier, we reported on how the team created the largest mural using an autonomous drone during the educational intensive “Archipelago-2023” in Novosibirsk.

Automated home assistants began gaining popularity in 1997 when the first prototype of a robotic vacuum was showcased. Today, there are numerous devices on the market that perform dry, wet, and combined cleaning.

“According to data from 2023, around 1.6 million imported cleaning robots enter the Russian market annually. Therefore, creating Russian technology is especially relevant. Additionally, we solved the main problem of existing vacuums by integrating a suction mechanism across the entire width of the body, rather than just in the center, to ensure better cleaning in hard-to-reach areas,” said Sergey Trushin, the lead developer of the vacuum robot and a graduate of MISIS University.

The cleaning quality of the robot, created in the Student Design Bureau at NUST MISIS, is comparable to manual cleaning, especially in room corners and along walls, where ordinary robots leave dust 2-3 centimeters away due to suction gaps being located in the middle of the body. The developers addressed this issue by relocating the suction gaps to the edges of the vacuum and ensuring uniform air suction speed throughout the cross-section.

Another feature implemented by the students is the ability to replace wet cleaning cloths without human intervention. For this, a screw mechanism and mounting plates were 3D printed.

“The main task of an engineer is to create products that are not only effective but also accessible to a wide range of users. NUST MISIS students were able to apply their knowledge in practice by solving problems faced by consumers. Our graduates are innovators, and we will continue to support them on this path by providing opportunities for development and self-realization. In the future, we plan to improve mechanisms for long-term stable operation,” noted Alexey Karpidov, head of the Department of Engineering of Technological Equipment.

Future plans include developing digital control systems for the components of the cleaning robot.

The jury has awarded two projects in the same category only three times in the award’s ten-year history. For the first time, both winning projects in the “Student Concept” category were supervised by the same mentor, Leon Bedoev, a senior lecturer in the Department of Automated Design and Engineering at MISIS University.

“Everything develops gradually. Last year, our students’ models reached the finals. This time, the students paid more attention to the feasibility of their projects—an important criterion in their category—enhanced their digital modeling skills, and they were so impressive that the jury decided to award two winners,” said Leon Bedoev.

Nikita Kruglyak, a third-year student of the Institute of Computer Science, designed a three-tier packaging for salads with multiple toppings. This packaging improves the user experience during meal assembly by eliminating the need for separate containers for each ingredient, while still maintaining the freshness and taste of the components until consumption. It is also more cost-effective for production.

“In my design, I aimed for simplicity and elegance to highlight the product’s quality and ensure ease of use. I chose polypropylene as the material—it’s a plastic that is temperature-resistant and safe for microwave use. This is convenient for consumers who want to heat their meals before eating,” explained Nikita Kruglyak.

Anna Grigorchuk, also a third-year student of the Institute of Computer Science, created a design concept for the skincare brand UVENTA. In her development, Anna considered the needs of the product’s target audience and focused on the natural composition of the product and the eco-friendliness of the packaging.

Experts evaluated the packaging designs based on eight criteria: construction, protective function, ease of use and storage, appeal and informativeness for the customer, originality of design, eco-friendliness, use of new technologies, and feasibility.

Spinal cord injuries affect up to 500,000 people worldwide annually. Most complications from such injuries are observed in large industrial cities, one of which is Moscow. Causes of these injuries include road accidents, an increase in the average population age, falls from heights, and accidents in the workplace. When there is partial damage to the spinal cord, the transmission of nerve signals stops at the site of injury. The most common treatment methods involve medication, mainly aimed at reducing inflammation and pain. Current efforts worldwide to restore the spinal cord involve cellular technologies and electrical stimulation of the damaged area, but often these solutions lack direction for restoring nerve fibers, which slows down the recovery process of the damaged area.

“One of the modern approaches to restoring nerve tissue is the development of a neuroimplant that contributes to recreating its structure. The implant must be mechanically compatible with native tissue, porous, and biodegradable so that its structure and material are ‘comfortable’ for cell attachment and tissue growth. Effective and comprehensive therapy for restoring spinal cord nerve tissue is currently lacking, so further development of such structures that can be implanted in the acute phase of injury is necessary,” said one of the developers of the neuroimplant, Eleonora Zelenova, a graduate student in the iPhD program in Biomaterials Science at NUST MISIS.

Scientists and students at NUST MISIS have created nanostructured frameworks made of a biocompatible polymer that closely resemble the mechanical characteristics of native spinal cord tissues. The neuroimplant has successfully passed in vitro tests, proving its effectiveness on cell cultures. The project is being implemented by a team of bioengineers from the University of MISIS in collaboration with partner organizations that are members of the Health Engineering consortium. Students in the iPhD program in Biomaterials Science under the guidance of Fedor Senatov, PhD, director of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at NUST MISIS, have been working on developing materials and products in the field of neuroengineering for several years.

“Attracting young people to science and developing skills in technology entrepreneurship are important tasks for NUST MISIS. Master’s and doctoral students at the university participate in the implementation of large-scale scientific projects funded by both the state and business partners of the university. The university operates the Student Technological Entrepreneurship Platform, where students can fulfill technological orders from industrial partners using the infrastructure and research base of NUST MISIS,” noted Alevtina Chernikova, Rector of the MISIS University.

The next step involves continuing research on animal models. A team of students and postgraduates from the MISIS University presented a project on developing and implementing a neuroimplant at the IV Moscow international festival of student entrepreneurship “Moscow is Start Point” in 2024 and won by a significant margin.

According to statistics, earthquakes account for about 13% of the total number of natural disasters that occur daily. The number of tremors recorded by seismographs reaches 100,000 events annually. About 1,000 of them are destructive. Analysis of the spatial distribution of earthquakes is an topical issue of geophysics, and some studies have identified patterns associated with the nature of earthquakes.

“The complex process of seismic activity seems chaotic on the surface. However, when considering the many earthquake sources, taking into account the values of their magnitudes, we can see that they form a multifractal, which can be investigated by fractal geometry methods. Such studies have been conducted by our students for several years. It has been proven that the deterministic components take place in the process of seismic activity. In particular, a connection has been established between the occurrence of earthquakes with large magnitudes and jumps in the fractal characteristics of many earthquake sources,” says Valeria Shikheeva, head of the study, associate professor of the Engineering Cybernetics Department at NUST MISIS.

In her master’s thesis, Alyona Koroleva, a graduate of the NUST MISIS College of Computer Sciences, studied the seismic activity of the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Japanese islands’ territories, which are located in the region of the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire with a large number of volcanoes that cause natural disasters.

“The seismic process manifests the properties of a hierarchical self-similar system in the distribution of earthquakes in time, space and energy — these properties are manifested in the Gutenberg-Richter law, which describes the relationship between the magnitude and the total number of earthquakes for any given period of time,” said Alena Koroleva.

The research carried out within the framework of the thesis has shown that an earthquake can be predicted in advance of the occurrence of the main shock — this is reflected in an abnormal drop in the value of the fractal dimension.

“The characteristics of self-similarity of seismic processes obtained by fractal geometry methods make it possible to identify stable patterns in the series of seismic events and help to increase the level of reliability of forecasts,” summed up the head of the study Valeria Shikheeva.

The results of the experiments can be used for further studies on the prediction of seismic events based on the analysis of the spatio-temporal distribution of earthquake sources correlation dimension.

A human only needs to articulate, in a natural language, what exactly has to be obtained as a result of the robot’s actions with the objects in front of it. This approach opens up new opportunities in robotics, rendering it possible to handle a wide spectrum of tasks that may now be posed in the form of a text query in a natural language.

Service robots have already become a part of everyday life, but they are still unable to reason upon anything. For example, a robot dog may be asked, “Bring me orange juice”. Our language model is already knowledgeable about the world and considers different options as acceptable: go to the kitchen, go to the store, go to the juice machine, etc. It evaluates them under the principle of whether it will affect the dealing with the global task “to bring orange juice” positively or negatively. Therefore, the “go to the bedroom” option is discarded. Then, using sorting algorithms, the robot evaluates the possibility of taking the action selected. As a result, we obtain an action plan for achieving the global goal, consisting of a set of simple robot actions.

“Practice has shown that our product makes it possible to apply the world knowledge of a large language model (LLM), already trained on a huge data set, to a physical robot without pre-training it. Furthermore, we are not limited to selecting only language models for code generation. We conducted our first experiments with a local open-source model — LLaMA-7B. However, the more powerful a language model is, the more logically complex applied tasks it is able to deal with,” Yaroslav Savelyev, a study author, a third-year student of the NUST MISIS Department of Engineering Cybernetics and an expert of the Sber Robotics Laboratory, said.

The work over the project started nine months ago at the initiative of Albert Efimov, Ph.D. (Philos.), Head of the NUST MISIS Department of Engineering Cybernetics, Vice President of Sberbank. The academic adviser was Alexander Semochkin, Ph.D. (Phys.-Math.), Chief Engineer of the Sberbank Robotics Laboratory. The goal was tomake use of the language model’s reasoning ability to help robots adapt to different tasks and environments.

This new AI capability opens up extremely broad prospects for practical application in industrial and service robotics. It will enable to significantly cut costs in the areas where programmers are expected to regularly change or adjust tasks at the place of production, for example, in the automotive sector, electrical engineering, electronics; construction, chemical industry, medicine and pharmaceuticals, etc. In addition, the integration of large language models and robots will prove useful where humans lack the speed of response, where hazardous conditions exist or where humans do not have the necessary skills and knowledge to interact with a robot.

The new ability of robots will help engineers avoid elaborating complex algorithms to set sequences of actions and set tasks through commands in a user-friendly form. Many research centers across the globe are conducting research in this area. In Russia, the Sberbank Robotics Laboratory, AIRI and NUST MISIS are consistently looking into the matter. The work of MISIS students has been recently recognized with a grant from the Innovation and Science Promotion Foundation.

One may observe the robot manipulator learning process.

During the first year after a spinal injury, the mortality rate of the patients reaches 30%, disability — slightly less than 100%. Disability in all nerve injuries occurs in 60% of all cases. Weak and insufficient regeneration of nerve tissue causes dificulties in treating such injuries.

Nerve tissue is a very special type of cellular structure. For the directed growth and transformation of multipotent stem cells into neuroglia cells, it is important not only to have an alternating electric field, but also its spatial orientation along the cell growth lines.

Based on this scientific hypothesis, NUST MISIS master’s students have developed and synthesized a flexible composite material with anisotropic (different in different directions) conductivity. Neuroimplants based on this material can be used to stimulate the regeneration and recovery of nerve tissue in areas of injuries.

The composite material is a scaffold with a collagen-based directed structure, containing a flexible biocompatible electrically conductive material from carbon fibre with an electrode diameter equal to the diameter of the nerve fiber of about 30 micrometres.

“To solve this problem, we have found the materials for the base and for the conductive component, developed a method for producing films with a conductive pattern, determined the physical and mechanical characteristics of the composite and tested the obtained samples in vitro,” said the author of the project, a graduate student of the NUST MISIS “Biomaterials Science” iPhD Master’s program Sergey Zhirnov.

Young researchers have developed a technique for producing flexible composite films with a conductive section sized comparable to the diameter of the nerve fiber. The “non-electrical” part of the material has properties close to those of the tissue of the peripheral nervous system, particularly in terms of modulus of elasticity.

Based on the synthesized material, a laboratory sample of the peripheral nerve implant has been obtained.

The developers continue to work on the project within the framework of the “Biomedical Materials and Bioengineering” strategic project as part of the “Priority 2030” program. The next steps will be: prototype production, in vitro material science and biological tests with nervous system cells, patenting of the invention and transition to preclinical medical trials.