Except for one of the 35 variables studied, clients in waves 4-9 did not differ from clients in waves 0-3, and were

no less likely to have contacts with authorities. All clients except one were injectors and syringe exchangers, and clients recruited later in the chain-referral even tended to attend the syringe exchange more frequently. Conclusions: Respondent-driven sampling originating from syringe exchange clients may have difficulty reaching beyond the population of injectors and syringe exchangers. The technique, new to this geographical setting, has potential for future studies, but particular efforts may be necessary to study out-of-treatment heavy drug users unknown to the syringe exchange program.”
“The selleck kinase inhibitor number of adolescents

undergoing weight loss surgery (WLS) has increased in response to the increasing prevalence of severe childhood obesity. Adolescents undergoing WLS require unique support, which may differ from adult programs. The aim of this study was to describe institutional and programmatic characteristics of centers participating in Teen Longitudinal Assessment of Bariatric Surgery (Teen-LABS), a prospective study investigating safety and efficacy of adolescent WLS. Data were obtained from the Teen-LABS database, and site survey completed by Teen-LABS investigators. The survey queried (1) institutional characteristics, (2) multidisciplinary team composition, (3) clinical program characteristics, and (4) clinical research infrastructure. All centers had extensive multidisciplinary involvement in the assessment, pre-operative education, selleck screening library and post-operative management of adolescents AEB071 undergoing WLS. Eligibility criteria and

pre-operative clinical and diagnostic evaluations were similar between programs. All programs have well-developed clinical research infrastructure, use adolescent-specific educational resources, and maintain specialty equipment, including high weight capacity diagnostic imaging equipment. The composition of clinical team and institutional resources is consistent with current clinical practice guidelines. These characteristics, coupled with dedicated research staff, have facilitated enrollment of 242 participants into Teen-LABS. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.”
“Dehazing is an important but difficult issue for image processing. Recently, many dehazing algorithms have been proposed based on the dark channel prior. However, these algorithms fail to achieve a good tradeoff between the dehazing performance and the computational complexity. Moreover, the perceptual quality of these algorithms can be further improved, especially for sky areas. Therefore, this paper firstly introduces the concept of negative correction inspired by the practical application of photographic developing and a fast image dehazing algorithm is accordingly proposed.