Predictors of Missed Hepatitis C Intake Appointments and Failure to Establish Hepatitis C Care Among Patients Living With HIV.

BackgroundWe estimated and characterized the proportion of patients living with HIV (PLWH) who missed hepatitis C (HCV) intake appointments and subsequently failed to establish HCV care.MethodsLogistic regression analyses were used to identify factors associated with missed HCV intake appointments and failure to establish HCV care among PLWH referred for HCV treatment between January 2014 and December 2017. In addition to demographics, variables included HIV treatment characteristics, type of insurance, liver health status, active alcohol or illicit drug use, unstable housing, and history of a mental health disorder (MHD).ResultsDuring the study period, 349 new HCV clinic appointments were scheduled for 202 unduplicated patients. Approximately half were nonwhite, and 80% had an undetectable HIV viral load. Drug use (31.7%), heavy alcohol use (32.8%), and MHD (37.8%) were prevalent. Over the 4-year period, 21.9% of PLWH referred for HCV treatment missed their HCV intake appointment. The proportion increased each year, from 17.2% in 2014 to 25.4% in 2017 (P = .021). Sixty-six of the 202 newly referred HCV patients (32.7%) missed their first HCV appointment, and 28 of these (42.4%) failed to establish HCV care. Having a history of MHD, CD4 <200, ongoing drug use, and being nonwhite were independent predictors of missing an intake HCV appointment. The strongest predictor of failure to establish HCV care was having a detectable HIV viral load.ConclusionsThe proportion of PLWH with missed HCV appointments increased over time. HCV elimination among PLWH may require integrated treatment of MHD and substance use

Counterparts to the Nuclear Bulge X-ray source population

We present an initial matching of the source positions of the Chandra Nuclear Bulge X-ray sources to the new UKIDSS-GPS near-infrared survey of the Nuclear Bulge. This task is made difficult by the extremely crowded nature of the region, despite this, we find candidate counterparts to ~50% of the X-ray sources. We show that detection in the J-band for a candidate counterpart to an X-ray source preferentially selects those candidate counterparts in the foreground whereas candidate counterparts with only detections in the H and K-bands are more likely to be Nuclear Bulge sources. We discuss the planned follow-up for these candidate counterparts.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, published in the proceedings of "A population Explosion", AIP Conference Proceedings Volume 1010, pp. 117-12

The Nuclear Bulge extinction

We present a new, high resolution (5" per pixel) near-infrared extinction map of the Nuclear Bulge using data from the UKIDSS-GPS. Using photometry from the J, H and K-bands we show that the extinction law parameter is also highly variable in this region on similar scales to the absolute extinction. We show that only when this extinction law variation is taken into account can the extinction be measured consistently at different wavelengths.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, published in the proceedings of "A population Explosion", AIP Conference Proceedings Volume 1010, pp. 168-17

Optimization of Storage-Referencing Gestures

We describe techniques for identifying and optimizing memory-accessing instruction sequences. We capture a sequence of such instructions, with the goal of sending the sequence as a single instruction from the CPU to a smart memory subsystem (IRAM or PIM). With a software/hardware codesign, the memory-accessing gestures can be rewritten as succinct superoperator instructions, and the gestures themselves could vary at runtime. As a result, the CPU executes fewer instructions and the CPU-memory bus is charged less often, resulting in lower power consumption. Reduction in power can be crucial for constrained, embedded systems. We discover gestures using a static and a dynamic approach, and we present data showing the presence of such gestures in real benchmarks (Java and C). We have shown the gesture-minimization problem to be NP-Complete, so we offer in this paper a heuristic approach the effectiveness of which we evaluate with experiments

Modeling infant object perception as program induction

Infants expect physical objects to be rigid and persist through space and time and in spite of occlusion. Developmentists frequently attribute these expectations to a "core system" for object recognition. However, it is unclear if this move is necessary. If object representations emerge reliably from general inductive learning mechanisms exposed to small amounts of environment data, it could be that infants simply induce these assumptions very early. Here, we demonstrate that a domain general learning system, previously used to model concept learning and language learning, can also induce models of these distinctive "core" properties of objects after exposure to a small number of examples. Across eight micro-worlds inspired by experiments from the developmental literature, our model generates concepts that capture core object properties, including rigidity and object persistence. Our findings suggest infant object perception may rely on a general cognitive process that creates models to maximize the likelihood of observationsComment: 3 pages, 3 figures, accepted at CCN conference 202