Gaurav Sharma

Bio: Gaurav Sharma is an academic researcher from Shenzhen University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Medicine & Photocatalysis. The author has an hindex of 82, co-authored 1244 publications receiving 31482 citations. Previous affiliations of Gaurav Sharma include Northeastern University & D. E. Shaw & Co..

Brief intervention for patients with problematic drug use presenting in emergency departments: a randomized clinical trial.

Abstract: Importance Medical treatment settings such as emergency departments (EDs) present important opportunities to address problematic substance use. Currently, EDs do not typically intervene beyond acute medical stabilization. Objective To contrast the effects of a brief intervention with telephone boosters (BI-B) with those of screening, assessment, and referral to treatment (SAR) and minimal screening only (MSO) among drug-using ED patients. Design, Setting, and Participants Between October 2010 and February 2012, 1285 adult ED patients from 6 US academic hospitals, who scored 3 or greater on the 10-item Drug Abuse Screening Test (indicating moderate to severe problems related to drug use) and who were currently using drugs, were randomized to MSO (n = 431), SAR (n = 427), or BI-B (n = 427). Follow-up assessments were conducted at 3, 6, and 12 months by blinded interviewers. Interventions Following screening, MSO participants received only an informational pamphlet. The SAR participants received assessment plus referral to addiction treatment if indicated, and the BI-B participants received assessment and referral as in SAR, plus a manual-guided counseling session based on motivational interviewing principles and up to 2 “booster” sessions by telephone during the month following the ED visit. Main Outcomes and Measures Outcomes evaluated at follow-up visits included self-reported days using the patient-defined primary problem drug, days using any drug, days of heavy drinking, and drug use based on analysis of hair samples. The primary outcome was self-reported days of use of the patient-defined primary problem drug during the 30-day period preceding the 3-month follow-up. Results Follow-up rates were 89%, 86%, and 81% at 3, 6, and 12 months, respectively. For the primary outcome, estimated differences in number of days of use (95% CI) were as follows: MSO vs BI-B, 0.72 (−0.80 to 2.24), P (adjusted) = .57; SAR vs BI-B, 0.70 (−0.83 to 2.23), P (adjusted) = .57; SAR vs MSO, −0.02 (−1.53 to 1.50), P (adjusted) = .98. There were no significant differences between groups in self-reported days using the primary drug, days using any drug, or heavy drinking days at 3, 6, or 12 months. At the 3-month follow-up, participants in the SAR group had a higher rate of hair samples positive for their primary drug of abuse (265 of 280 [95%]) than did participants in the MSO group (253 of 287 [88%]) or the BI-B group (244 of 275 [89%]). Hair analysis differences between groups at other time points were not significant. Conclusions and Relevance In this sample of drug users seeking emergency medical treatment, a relatively robust brief intervention did not improve substance use outcomes. More work is needed to determine how drug use disorders may be addressed effectively in the ED. Trial Registration clinicaltrials.gov Identifier:NCT01207791

Bupropion and Naltrexone in Methamphetamine Use Disorder

Abstract: Background The use of naltrexone plus bupropion to treat methamphetamine use disorder has not been well studied. Methods We conducted this multisite, double-blind, two-stage, placebo-contr...

Automatic assessment of damage and repair costs in vehicles

Abstract: A system and method are provided for automatically estimating a repair cost for a vehicle. A method includes: receiving, at a server computing device over an electronic network, one or more images of a damaged vehicle from a client computing device; performing image processing operations on each of the one or more images to detect external damage to a first set of parts of the vehicle; inferring internal damage to a second set of parts of the vehicle based on the detected external damage; and, calculating an estimated repair cost for the vehicle based on the detected external damage and inferred internal damage based on accessing a parts database that includes repair and labor costs for each part in the first and second sets of parts.

I and i

Abstract: There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality. Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

SPAdes, a new genome assembly algorithm and its applications to single-cell sequencing ( 7th Annual SFAF Meeting, 2012)

Abstract: The lion's share of bacteria in various environments cannot be cloned in the laboratory and thus cannot be sequenced using existing technologies. A major goal of single-cell genomics is to complement gene-centric metagenomic data with whole-genome assemblies of uncultivated organisms. Assembly of single-cell data is challenging because of highly non-uniform read coverage as well as elevated levels of sequencing errors and chimeric reads. We describe SPAdes, a new assembler for both single-cell and standard (multicell) assembly, and demonstrate that it improves on the recently released E+V-SC assembler (specialized for single-cell data) and on popular assemblers Velvet and SoapDeNovo (for multicell data). SPAdes generates single-cell assemblies, providing information about genomes of uncultivatable bacteria that vastly exceeds what may be obtained via traditional metagenomics studies. SPAdes is available online ( http://bioinf.spbau.ru/spades ). It is distributed as open source software.