Systems Analysis of a Dedicated Ambulatory Respiratory Unit for Seeing and Ensuring Follow-up of Patients With COVID-19 Symptoms.

COVID-19 necessitated significant care redesign, including new ambulatory workflows to handle surge volumes, protect patients and staff, and ensure timely reliable care. Opportunities also exist to harvest lessons from workflow innovations to benefit routine care. We describe a dedicated COVID-19 ambulatory unit for closing testing and follow-up loops characterized by standardized workflows and electronic communication, documentation, and order placement. More than 85% of follow-ups were completed within 24 hours, with no observed staff, nor patient infections associated with unit operations. Identified issues include role confusion, staffing and gatekeeping bottlenecks, and patient reluctance to visit in person or discuss concerns with phone screeners.

Initial diagnosis of insignificant cancer, high-grade prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia, atypical small acinar proliferation, and negative have the same rate of upgrade to a Gleason score of 7 or higher on repeat prostate biopsy.

Extended prostate needle core biopsies are standard of care for the diagnosis of prostatic carcinoma. Subsequent biopsies may be performed for a variety of indications. Knowledge of biopsy characteristics indicating risk for progression may have utility to guide therapeutic management. Prostate needle core biopsies performed between 2008 and 2014 were reviewed. Patients with at least 1 subsequent biopsy were identified. Cases were categorized by worst initial diagnosis. Gleason ≤6 carcinoma was further classified as significant or insignificant with insignificant defined as follows: ≤2 cores with carcinoma, sites with ≤50% carcinoma, and unilateral carcinoma. A total of 329 men underwent repeat biopsies. Gleason ≤6 insignificant carcinoma, high-grade prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia (HGPIN) and/or atypical small acinar proliferation, and negative biopsies had a similar rate of Gleason ≥7 upon repeat biopsy (16%, 17%, 14%; P = .91). Initial biopsy diagnoses of Gleason ≤6 significant carcinoma had a higher rate of Gleason ≥7 on repeat biopsy compared with initial biopsies of Gleason ≤6 insignificant carcinoma (39%, 16%; P = .003). Within initial diagnoses of Gleason ≤6, 1 core compared with more than 1 core positive had a lower rate of Gleason ≥7 on repeat biopsy (17%, 30%), although this difference was not significant (P = .08). An initial biopsy diagnosed as Gleason ≤6 insignificant carcinoma, HGPIN and/or atypical small acinar proliferation, or negative had a similar substantial risk of Gleason ≥7 carcinoma upon subsequent biopsy. Our findings support the continued stratification of Gleason ≤6 and thus the diagnostic workup of all atypical foci to provide an accurate, thorough number of involved cores.

Urologist's Impact on Needle Core Prostate Biopsy Histopathologic Variables Within a Single Institution.

OBJECTIVE: To assess the urologist's impact on prostate needle core biopsy variables including number of containers submitted, total core length, longest core length, and individual core length threshold values, and to elucidate the relationship between these variables and cancer detection rate within a recent cohort. METHODS: A retrospective search was performed to identify patients who had an extended transrectal ultrasound-guided prostate needle core biopsy between 2008 and 2013. RESULTS: One thousand one prostate biopsies were analyzed. Total core length (mean 13.2-22.9 cm, P < .001) significantly varied by submitting urologist but did not impact cancer detection rate per case. Increased core length per container impacted the cancer detection per container (P < .001). The number of cores that met threshold values of 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5 cm as well as longest individual core length (mean 1.7-2.2 cm) significantly varied between urologist (P < .001), although there was no association between these variables and cancer detection. Container number differed significantly between urologists (P < .001) but did not correlate with cancer detection. For the single urologist with a change in his submission protocol during the study period, a nonsignificant change in cancer detection was noted when comparing 12-14 containers vs 6-9 containers. CONCLUSION: Submitting urologist significantly impacts prostate biopsy metrics. An increased amount of tissue per container was associated with higher rates of cancer per container. A nonsignificant change in cancer detection rate was observed when container number was reduced from 12-14 to 6-9.

Accurate in situ measurement of complex refractive index and particle size in intralipid emulsions.

A first accurate measurement of the complex refractive index in an intralipid emulsion is demonstrated, and thereby the average scatterer particle size using standard Mie scattering calculations is extracted. Our method is based on measurement and modeling of the reflectance of a divergent laser beam from the sample surface. In the absence of any definitive reference data for the complex refractive index or particle size in highly turbid intralipid emulsions, we base our claim of accuracy on the fact that our work offers several critically important advantages over previously reported attempts. First, our measurements are in situ in the sense that they do not require any sample dilution, thus eliminating dilution errors. Second, our theoretical model does not employ any fitting parameters other than the two quantities we seek to determine, i.e., the real and imaginary parts of the refractive index, thus eliminating ambiguities arising from multiple extraneous fitting parameters. Third, we fit the entire reflectance-versus-incident-angle data curve instead of focusing on only the critical angle region, which is just a small subset of the data. Finally, despite our use of highly scattering opaque samples, our experiment uniquely satisfies a key assumption behind the Mie scattering formalism, namely, no multiple scattering occurs. Further proof of our method's validity is given by the fact that our measured particle size finds good agreement with the value obtained by dynamic light scattering.