Related papers: Accelerated infection testing at scale: a proposal…

COVID-19, a viral respiratory pandemic, has rapidly spread throughout the globe. Large scale and rapid testing of the population is required to contain the disease, but such testing is prohibitive in terms of resources, cost and time.…

Suppressing SARS-CoV-2 will likely require the rapid identification and isolation of infected individuals, on an ongoing basis. RT-PCR (reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) tests are accurate but costly, making regular testing…

As humanity struggles to contain the global Covid-19 infection, prophylactic actions are grandly slowed down by the shortage of testing kits. Governments have taken several measures to work around this shortage: the FDA has become more…

Estimating the prevalence of a disease is necessary for evaluating and mitigating risks of its transmission within or between populations. Estimates that consider how prevalence changes with time provide more information about these risks…

The usual problem for group testing is this: For a given number of individuals and a given prevalence, how many tests T* are required to find every infected individual? In real life, however, the problem is usually different: For a given…

We consider a novel method to increase the reliability of COVID-19 virus or antibody tests by using specially designed pooled testings. Instead of testing nasal swab or blood samples from individual persons, we propose to test mixtures of…

In the current COVID19 crisis many national healthcare systems are confronted with an acute shortage of tests for confirming SARS-CoV-2 infections. For low overall infection levels in the population, pooling of samples can drastically…

We present a method for efficient estimation of the prevalence of infection in a population with high accuracy using only a small number of tests. The presented approach uses pool testing with a mix of pool sizes of various sizes. The test…

Background: Rapid testing for an infection is paramount during a pandemic to prevent continued viral spread and excess morbidity and mortality. This study aimed to determine whether alternative testing strategies based on sample pooling can…

Fast testing can help mitigate the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Despite their accuracy for single sample analysis, infectious diseases diagnostic tools, like RT-PCR, require substantial resources to test large populations.…

We propose a novel testing and containment strategy in order to contain the spread of SARS-CoV2 while permitting large parts of the population to resume social and economic activity. Our approach recognises the fact that testing capacities…

When testing for a disease such as COVID-19, the standard method is individual testing: we take a sample from each individual and test these samples separately. An alternative is pooled testing (or "group testing"), where samples are mixed…

Sample pooling consists in combining samples from multiple individuals into a single pool that is then tested using a unique test-kit. A positive test means that at least one individual within the pool is infected. Here, we propose an…

The group testing approach that achieves significant cost reduction over the individual testing approach has received a lot of interest lately for massive testing of COVID-19. Many studies simply assume samples mixed in a group are…

When testing for infections, the standard method is to test each subject individually. If testing methodology is such that samples from multiple subjects can be efficiently combined and tested at once, yielding a positive results if any one…

The corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the novel corona virus has an exponential rate of infection. COVID-19 is particularly notorious as the onset of symptoms in infected patients are usually delayed and there exists a large…

There are multiple testing methods to ascertain an infection in an individual and they vary in their performances, cost and delay. Unfortunately, better performing tests are sometimes costlier and time consuming and can only be done for a…

COVID-19 has resulted in a global health crisis that may become even more acute over the upcoming months. One of the main reasons behind the current rapid growth of COVID-19 in the U.S. population is the limited availability of testing kits…

In comparison with individual testing, group testing (also known as pooled testing) is more efficient in reducing the number of tests and potentially leading to tremendous cost reduction. As indicated in the recent article posted on the US…

In epidemic or pandemic situations, resources for testing the infection status of individuals may be scarce. Although group testing can help to significantly increase testing capabilities, the (repeated) testing of entire populations can…