No abstract

Individuals leaving prison face challenges to establishing healthy lives in the community, including opportunities to engage in behavior that puts them at risk for HIV transmission. HIV prevention case management (PCM) can facilitate linkages to services, which in turn can help remove barriers to healthy behavior. As part of a federally funded demonstration project, the community-based organization Centerforce provided 5 months of PCM to individuals leaving 3 state prisons in California. Program effects were measured by assessing changes in risk behavior, access to services, reincarnation, and program completion. Although response rates preclude definitive conclusions, HIV risk behavior did decrease. Regardless of race, age, or gender, those receiving comprehensive health services were significantly more likely to complete the program. PCM appears to facilitate healthy behavior for individuals leaving prison.

Null Subtraction Imaging (NSI) is a new beamforming technique for producing B-mode images that results in high spatial resolution and low computational cost compared to other high-spatial resolution imaging techniques. Previous work has demonstrated that in addition to a narrow main lobe and low side lobes, NSI can also reduce or mitigate grating lobes. Grating lobes can appear when the wavelength of ultrasound is larger than the pitch of the array and these grating lobes can result in imaging artifacts. Lower grating lobes on a larger pitch array could allow larger linear arrays for abdominal imaging with lower element count. Experiments were conducted to quantify the tradeoff between grating lobe levels and pitch size when using NSI. NSI was able to reduce grating lobes by up to 19dB with an element pitch of five times the wavelength. The effects of the DC offset (a tunable parameter of NSI) on grating lobe reduction were also testedand found that NSI with a lower DC offset provides greater reduction in grating lobes, with up to 40dB reduction. The level of grating lobe reduction versus the depth of a target was also testedand found a slight decrease in grating lobe reduction at greater depths.