Related papers: Accelerated infection testing at scale: a proposal…
A key requirement in containing contagious diseases, such as the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, is the ability to efficiently carry out mass diagnosis over large populations. Some of the leading testing procedures, such as…
The CoVid-19 is spreading pandemically all over the world. A rapid defeat of the pandemic requires carrying out on the population a mass screening, able to separate positive from negative cases. Such a cleaning will free a flow of…
Major advances in public health have resulted from disease prevention. However, prevention of a new infectious disease by vaccination or pharmaceuticals is made difficult by the slow process of vaccine and drug development. We propose an…
We propose a mathematical model based on probability theory to optimize COVID-19 testing by a multi-step batch testing approach with variable batch sizes. This model and simulation tool dramatically increase the efficiency and efficacy of…
Pooled testing offers an efficient solution to the unprecedented testing demands of the COVID-19 pandemic, although with potentially lower sensitivity and increased costs to implementation in some settings. Assessments of this trade-off…
The Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RTPCR)} test is the silver bullet diagnostic test to discern COVID infection. Rapid antigen detection is a screening test to identify COVID positive patients in little as 15 minutes, but…
Large scale disease screening is a complicated process in which high costs must be balanced against pressing public health needs. When the goal is screening for infectious disease, one approach is group testing in which samples are…
Group testing allows saving chemical reagents, analysis time, and costs, by testing pools of samples instead of individual samples. We introduce a class of group testing protocols with small dilution, suited to operate even at high…
The COVID-19 pandemic poses challenges for continuing economic activity while reducing health risks. While these challenges can be mitigated through testing, testing budget is often limited. Here we study how institutions, such as nursing…
Rapid testing of appropriate specimens from patients suspected for a disease during an epidemic, such as the current Coronavirus outbreak, is of a great importance for the disease management and control. We propose a method to enhance…
The cataclysmic contagion based calamity -- Covid-19 has shown us a clear need for a comprehensive community based strategy that overcomes the sheer complexity of controlling it and the caveats of current methods. In this regard, as seen in…
We propose `Tapestry', a novel approach to pooled testing with application to COVID-19 testing with quantitative Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) that can result in shorter testing time and conservation of reagents…
In the group testing problem we aim to identify a small number of infected individuals within a large population. We avail ourselves to a procedure that can test a group of multiple individuals, with the test result coming out positive iff…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many institutions such as universities and workplaces implemented testing regimens with every member of some population tested longitudinally, and those testing positive isolated for some time. Although the…
Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing is the gold standard for diagnosing COVID-19. PCR amplifies the virus DNA 40 times to produce measurements of viral loads that span seven orders of magnitude. Unfortunately, the outputs of these tests…
Repeated asymptomatic screening for SARS-CoV-2 promises to control spread of the virus but would require too many resources to implement at scale. Group testing is promising for screening more people with fewer test resources: multiple…
The spread of COVID-19 makes it essential to investigate its prevalence. In such investigation research, as far as we know, the widely-used sampling methods didn't use the information sufficiently about the numbers of the previously…
We consider the optimal strategy for laboratory testing of biological samples when we wish to know the results for each sample rather than the average prevalence of positive samples. If the proportion of positive samples is low considerable…
In order to identify the infected individuals of a population, their samples are divided in equally sized groups called pools and a single laboratory test is applied to each pool. Individuals whose samples belong to pools that test negative…
We consider real-time timely tracking of infection status (e.g., covid-19) of individuals in a population. In this work, a health care provider wants to detect infected people as well as people who have recovered from the disease as quickly…