Yulia Tunakova

Background: Lipid peroxidation is a primary driver of biological membrane damage and mediates the relationship between environmental exposure and adverse health outcomes. Malondialdehyde (MDA) is a widely recognized biomarker for quantifying oxidative stress intensity. Despite numerous studies on oxidative stress and metal exposure, nonlinear relationships between physiological characteristics, serum metal profiles and MDA levels in pubertal children remain insufficiently studied. Methods: The study included 105 conditionally healthy children aged 12–14 years from urban and rural regions of Tatarstan, Russia. Serum MDA concentrations were determined spectrophotometrically using the thiobarbituric acid assay, while Zn, Cu, Fe, Sr and Pb concentrations were measured by atomic absorption spectrometry. A multilayer perceptron neural network was applied to model nonlinear relationships between MDA levels, environmental exposure indicators and morphophysiological characteristics. Because the original relational dataset contained partially replicated participant-derived relational structures, primary validation was performed using independently reconstructed datasets without repeated observations. Additional repeated cross-validation and SHAP-based feature importance analysis were performed. Results: Urban-residing children demonstrated significantly higher serum MDA levels than rural counterparts, independent of sex, with girls consistently showing higher values. Reduction of predictor dimensionality improved model generalization behaviour. Validation using independently reconstructed datasets without repeated observations demonstrated reproducible exploratory predictive behaviour of the reduced neural network model, with independently reconstructed validation datasets yielding mean R² values of 0.901 ± 0.052 and 0.914 ± 0.046, respectively. SHAP analysis demonstrated that zinc, copper and iron consistently represented the dominant contributors to the nonlinear model, although substantial variability in the relative ranking of zinc and copper was observed between validation datasets. Conclusions: The proposed neural network model demonstrated the ability to capture reproducible nonlinear relationships between oxidative stress markers and environmental exposure parameters in a limited biomedical dataset. The model should primarily be interpreted as an exploratory explanatory tool rather than an individual clinical prediction instrument. Because of the limited dataset size, partially reconstructed relational structure and exploratory study design, the findings require cautious interpretation and further external validation.

This study is devoted to creating a neural network technology for assessing metal accumulation in the body of a metropolis resident with short-term and long-term intake from anthropogenic sources. Direct assessment of metal retention in the human body is virtually impossible due to the many internal mechanisms that ensure the kinetics of metals and the wide variety of organs, tissues, cellular structures, and secretions that ensure their functional redistribution, transport, and cumulation. We have developed an intelligent multi-neural network model capable of calculating the content of metals in the human body based on data on their environmental content. The model is two interconnected neural networks trained on actual measurement data. Since metals enter the body from the environment, the predictors of the model are metal content in drinking water and soil. In this case, water characterizes the short-term impact on the organism, and drinking water, combined with metal contents in soil, is a depository medium that accumulates metals from anthropogenic sources—the long-term impact. In addition, human physiological characteristics are taken into account in the calculations. Each period of exposure is taken into account by its neural network. Two variants of the model are proposed: open loop, where the calculation is performed by each neural network separately, and closed loop, where neural networks work together. The model built in this way was trained and tested on the data of real laboratory studies of 242 people living in different districts of Kazan. As a result, the accuracy of the neural network block for calculating long-term impact was 90% and higher, and the accuracy of the block for calculating short-term impact was 92% and higher. The closed double-loop model showed an accuracy of at least 96%. Conclusions: Our proposed method of assessing and quantifying metal accumulation in the body has high accuracy and reliability. It does not require expensive laboratory tests and allows quantifying the body’s metal accumulation content based on readily available information. The calculation results can be used as a tool for clinical diagnostics and operational and planned management to reduce the levels of polymetallic contamination in urban areas.

High metal concentrations in the body’s biological substrates often result from a persistent, cumulative impact of adverse environmental conditions. This article considers the quantitative composition of human biological substrates as an indicator of the state of urban ecosystem components. Assessing the accumulation of metals in the body by directly measuring their concentrations in biological substrates is a multi-step analytical procedure. Here, a quick-and-easy method for determining metal concentrations in biological substrates based on a neural network algorithm was introduced. A complex neural network model was developed to enable the determination of metal inputs from the air and food-water system without the need for invasive sampling of biomaterials or too difficult processing and analysis of the samples obtained. The model also proved to be feasible in solving the inverse problems associated with the determination of metal thresholds in various components of urban ecosystems.

The regulation of the anthropogenic load on waterbodies is carried out based on water quality standards that are determined using the threshold values of hydrochemical indicators. These applied standards should be defined both geographically and differentially, taking into account the regional specifics of the formation of surface water compositions. However, there is currently no unified approach to defining these regional standards. It is, therefore. appropriate to develop regional water quality standards utilizing modern technologies for the mathematical purpose of methods analysis using both experimental data sources and information system technologies. As suggested by the use of sets of chemical analysis and neural network cluster analysis, both methods of analysis and an expert assessment could identify surface water types as well as define the official regional threshold values of hydrochemical system indicators, to improve the adequacy of assessments and ensure the mathematical justification of developed standards. The process for testing the proposed approach was carried out, using the surface water resource objects in the territory of the Republic of Tatarstan as our example, in addition to using the results of long-term systematic measurements of informative hydrochemical indicators. In the first stage, typing was performed on surface waters using the neural network clustering method. Clustering was performed based on sets of determined hydrochemical parameters in Kohonen’s self-organizing neural network. To assess the uniformity of data, groups in each of the selected clusters were represented by specialists in this subject area’s region. To determine the regional threshold values of hydrochemical indicators, statistical data for the corresponding clusters were calculated, and the ranges of these values were used. The results of testing this proposed approach allowed us to recommend it for identifying surface water types, as well as to define the threshold values of hydrochemical indicators in the territory of any region with different surface water compositions.