Physician specialization and women's primary care services in an urban HIV clinic.

To compare adherence to published primary care guidelines by general internal medicine and infectious diseases (ID) specialist physicians treating HIV-positive women we conducted a retrospective patient record review of 148 female HIV-positive patients seen at the Nathan Smith Clinic in New Haven, Connecticut, in 2001 and 2002. Four quality measures were defined to evaluate physician practices: annual cervical cancer screening, influenza vaccination and hyperlipidemia screening, and biennial mammography. Main outcome was the frequency of meeting each measure by generalist and ID-specialist physicians, and the two physician types were compared after controlling for patient clustering, age, and CD4 cell count.

Comparison of spectral variation from spectroscopy to spectral imaging.

Optical biopsy has been shown to discriminate between normal and diseased tissue with high sensitivity and specificity. Fiber-optic probe-based spectroscopy systems do not provide the necessary spatial information to guide therapy effectively, ultimately requiring a transition from probe-based spectroscopy to spectral imaging. The effect of such a transition on fluorescence and diffuse reflectance line shape is investigated.

The assessment of bioavailability in the presence of nonlinear elimination.

The simultaneous administration of an oral dose and intravenous tracer dose, as a method to determine bioavailability, was examined by means of computer simulation for drugs exhibiting Michaelis-Menten type elimination. A physiological pharmacokinetic model parameterized for man and including first-order absorption and elimination solely from the liver was employed. This tracer method provided good estimates of the true availability, with an error of 6% or less, over a wide range of dosing and dispositional conditions.