Coccidioidomycosis causing osteomyelitis of the hand in an immunocompetent patient.

Coccidioidomycosis osteomyelitis is a rare entity considered even more rare when identified in the immunocompetent patient. In non-endemic areas, the diagnosis of a fungus-causing osteomyelitis is often delayed or overlooked. This results in delayed or inappropriate treatment. We present the case of a 35-year-old immunocompetent male immigrant from India who was ultimately diagnosed as having Coccidioidomycosis immitis osteomyelitis of his ring finger metacarpal. His initial surgery included drainage and bacterial cultures only. When he failed to improve, he presented for a second opinion. The patient's origin and travel history coupled with the appearance of rapid bone destruction on plain radiographs prompted a second operation for tissue biopsy and culture for bacteria, fungus, and mycobacteria cultures. This case highlights the importance of a thorough clinical history in deriving an appropriate differential diagnosis prior to surgical intervention.

Learning Data-Driven Patient Risk Stratification Models for Clostridium difficile.

BACKGROUND: Although many risk factors are well known, Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) continues to be a significant problem throughout the world. The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a data-driven, hospital-specific risk stratification procedure for estimating the probability that an inpatient will test positive for C difficile. METHODS: We consider electronic medical record (EMR) data from patients admitted for ≥24 hours to a large urban hospital in the U.S. between April 2011 and April 2013. Predictive models were constructed using L2-regularized logistic regression and data from the first year. The number of observational variables considered varied from a small set of well known risk factors readily available to a physician to over 10 000 variables automatically extracted from the EMR. Each model was evaluated on holdout admission data from the following year. A total of 34 846 admissions with 372 cases of CDI was used to train the model. RESULTS: Applied to the separate validation set of 34 722 admissions with 355 cases of CDI, the model that made use of the additional EMR data yielded an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.81 (95% confidence interval [CI], .79-.83), and it significantly outperformed the model that considered only the small set of known clinical risk factors, AUROC of 0.71 (95% CI, .69-.75). CONCLUSIONS: Automated risk stratification of patients based on the contents of their EMRs can be used to accurately identify a high-risk population of patients. The proposed method holds promise for enabling the selective allocation of interventions aimed at reducing the rate of CDI.

Unusual case of cutaneous and synovial Paecilomyces lilacinus infection of hand successfully treated with voriconazole and review of published literature.

Paecilomyces lilacinus infection is rare and is found worldwide. The majority of infections occur in immunocompromised people. Among immunocompetent patients, cutaneous infections are the second most common site of infection but are difficult to treat because of antifungal resistance. We report a case of hand cutaneous involvement with synovitis in an immunocompetent patient that improved after treatment with oral voriconazole. To the best of our knowledge, there are only five published cases of cutaneous P.lilacinus infection, all in immunocompromised patient, treated with oral voriconazole. We review all previously reported cases.