Barriers in the HCV treatment cascade after confirmed diagnosis

Background: Hepatitis C (HCV) is the most common blood-borne viral infection in the United States with an estimated prevalence of 2.4 million people[1]. Oklahoma has an estimated 54,000 chronic cases of hepatitis C and has the highest exposure rate of all 50 states[2]. Even with increased screening and access to medications, gaps exist in the cascade of care for patients with hepatitis C with approximately 40% of diagnosed patients not having been prescribed antiviral treatment[3]. Treatment of hepatitis C has been associated with a reduction in liver failure, a reduction in hepatocellular carcinoma, and a reduction in all-cause mortality.Aim: With increased access to curative medications and better treatment options for hepatitis C, our goal is to determine the barriers to treatment for those who have been diagnosed with hepatitis C. By removing barriers to hepatitis C treatment, we can decrease the incidence and prevalence of this disease. Furthermore, by decreasing the disease burden of hepatitis C, we can decrease rates of liver disease, cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma, and associated morbidity and mortality.Method: We conducted a retrospective review of lab data from the electronic health record for patients seen by the OSU Family Medicine department. Patients who had a detectable HCV viral load lab drawn between January 1, 2018 to March 31, 2019 was generated. From this list we identified those patients who were not actively being treated for HCV. Our intervention was contacting these patients to assess any barriers which may have delayed treatment, and evaluate how effective this phone call is in connecting patients with the proper resources to proceed to the next step in work up and treatment

External cavity diode laser based upon an FBG in an integrated optical fiber platform

An external cavity diode laser is demonstrated using a Bragg grating written into a novel integrated optical fiber platform as the external cavity. The cavity is fabricated using flame-hydrolysis deposition to bond a photosensitive fiber to a silica-on-silicon wafer, and a grating written using direct UV-writing. The laser operates on a single mode at the acetylene P13 line (1532.83 nm) with 9 mW output power. The noise properties of the laser are characterized demonstrating low linewidth operation (< 14 kHz) and superior relative intensity noise characteristics when compared to a commercial tunable external cavity diode laser

Differentiating the Weyl generic dimension formula and support varieties for quantum groups

The authors compute the support varieties of all irreducible modules for the small quantum group $u_\zeta(\mathfrak{g})$, where $\mathfrak{g}$ is a simple complex Lie algebra, and $\zeta$ is a primitive $\ell$-th root of unity with $\ell$ larger than the Coxeter number of $\mathfrak{g}$. The calculation employs the prior calculations and techniques of Ostrik and of Nakano--Parshall--Vella, as well as deep results involving the validity of the Lusztig character formula for quantum groups and the positivity of parabolic Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials for the affine Weyl group. Analogous support variety calculations are provided for the first Frobenius kernel $G_1$ of a reductive algebraic group scheme $G$ defined over the prime field $\mathbb{F}_p$.Comment: 10 pages, various typos corrected, references update

Radioactive Demonstration Of Mineralized Waste Forms Made From Hanford Low Activity Waste (Tank SX-105 And AN-103) By Fluidized Bed Steam Reformation

One of the immobilization technologies under consideration as a Supplemental Treatment for Hanford’s Low Activity Waste (LAW) is Fluidized Bed Steam Reforming (FBSR). The FBSR technology forms a mineral waste form at moderate processing temperatures thus retaining and atomically bonding the halides, sulfates, and technetium in the mineral phases (nepheline, sodalite, nosean, carnegieite). Additions of kaolin clay are used instead of glass formers and the minerals formed by the FBSR technology offers (1) atomic bonding of the radionuclides and constituents of concern (COC) comparable to glass, (2) short and long term durability comparable to glass, (3) disposal volumes comparable to glass, and (4) higher Na2O and SO{sub 4} waste loadings than glass. The higher FBSR Na{sub 2}O and SO{sub 4} waste loadings contribute to the low disposal volumes but also provide for more rapid processing of the LAW. Recent FBSR processing and testing of Hanford radioactive LAW (Tank SX-105 and AN-103) waste is reported and compared to previous radioactive and non-radioactive LAW processing and testing

Laser-based fabrication of micromechanical diaphragms for pressure sensing using Bragg Gratings

Micromechanical devices are typically fabricated in expensive cleanrooms using techniques that are not conducive towards rapid and varied prototyping. This is typically because photolithography remains the main method for patterning of layers and should a small change be desired in the design, a new mask would have to be made, which is both a costly and slow process. This work reports a laser based approach for micromechanical diaphragm fabrication. The technique uses rapid thermal heating and subsequent quenching to a pattern a hard thermal oxide layer on a silicon substrate. This method used a computer controlled 9.3 micrometre wavelength CO2 laser beam to spot mark areas that were subsequently wet etched. This approach was found to be extremely repeatable and gave good consistency. It does not require cleanroom processing and is significantly more cost and time effective. Diaphragm feature size was observed to have a variability of <1% for diaphragms of several millimetres in size

Opioid Usage During Admission in Hip Fracture Patients-The Effect of the Continuous Femoral Nerve Block

INTRODUCTION: The aim of this study was to investigate whether there was a difference in opioid usage during admission for hip fracture patients with continuous femoral nerve block (cFNB) when compared to patients nonfemoral nerve block (nFNB). METHODS AND MATERIALS: Patients were identified from the local database on all hip fracture patients admitted to Bispebjerg University Hospital, Denmark. Four hundred fifty-six hip fracture patients were included during the period September 2008 to October 2010. RESULTS: Three hundred sixty-six hip fracture patients had cFNB. The mean time with cFNB was 3.4 days. There were no significant differences in gender, length of stay, time to surgery, mortality rate, in-hospital falls, or resurgery rates during admission between the 2 groups. The nFNB group had an insignificant higher use of morphine as needed during the first 5 days of admission (nFNB: 53.1 mg, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 34.4-71.7; cFNB: 47.7 mg, 95% CI: 40.7-64.3; P = .54) and during the whole admission (cFNB: 34.3 mg, 95% CI: 23.2-45.5; cFNB: 30.3 mg, 95% CI: 26.6-33.0; P = .4). Some 8.47% of the total morphine consumption during admission was morphine as needed for the nFNB group and 9.89% for the cFNB group. CONCLUSION: Patients with cFNB did only have a marginally lower opioid usage during admission when compared to patients without the block, with no significance between the 2 groups. This could indicate that the cFNB is an ineffective analgesic strategy, especially in the postoperative period, but larger randomized studies are needed in order to clarify this

Using k-nearest neighbor algorithm to identify mechanical vibrational modes of a cantilever with spectrally multiplexed fiber Bragg gratings

We demonstrated for the first time the identification of mechanical modes of a cantilever with attached fiber Bragg gratings using k-Nearest Neighbor, a machine learning algorithm. We analyzed the frequency range of 40-300 Hz and an acceleration of 1.1 ± 0.1 g

Identifying mechanical vibration modes of a cantilever using spectrally multiplexed Bragg gratings and machine learning

In this paper, we demonstrated the use of the k-Nearest Neighbor, a machine learning algorithm, to identify mechanical vibration modes of a cantilever beam in a frequency range between 40-300 Hz at an accelerations of 1.1±0.1 g. We attached fiber Bragg gratings to the cantilever structure and analyzed the spectral response during vibration. We observe small increases in spectral bandwidth of three Bragg gratings to perform a 3-dimensional classification environment and evaluated the accuracy of the algorithm with independent testing data