Related papers: Multi-Level Group Testing with Application to 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…
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.…
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…
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…
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.…
Testing is recommended for all close contacts of confirmed COVID-19 patients. However, existing group testing methods are oblivious to the circumstances of contagion provided by contact tracing. Here, we build upon a well-known…
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…
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…
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…
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an ongoing pandemic infectious disease outbreak that has significantly harmed and threatened the health and lives of millions or even billions of people. COVID-19 has also negatively impacted the…
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…
In pandemics or epidemics, public health authorities need to rapidly test a large number of individuals, both to determine the line of treatment as well as to know the spread of infection to plan containment, mitigation and future…
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…
An important component of every country's COVID-19 response is fast and efficient testing - to identify and isolate cases, as well as for early detection of local hotspots. For many countries, producing a sufficient number of tests has been…
Group testing can save testing resources in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In group testing, we are given $n$ samples, one per individual, and arrange them into $m < n$ pooled samples, where each pool is obtained by mixing a…