Related papers: Contact Tracing Information Improves the Performan…

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 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…

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…

Infectious diseases that spread silently through asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic infections represent a challenge for policy makers. A traditional way of achieving isolation of silent infectors from the community is through forward contact…

We study the problem usually referred to as group testing in the context of COVID-19. Given n samples collected from patients, how should we select and test mixtures of samples to maximize information and minimize the number of tests? Group…

Combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) is a useful testing technique to address the interaction of input parameters in software systems. In many applications, the technique has been used as a systematic sampling technique to sample the…

Discovering and isolating infected individuals is a cornerstone of epidemic control. Because many infectious diseases spread through close contacts, contact tracing is a key tool for case discovery and control. However, although contact…

Digital contact tracing is being used by many countries to help contain COVID-19's spread in a post-lockdown world. Among the various available techniques, decentralized contact tracing that uses Bluetooth received signal strength…

Whenever possible, the efficacy of a new treatment, such as a drug or behavioral intervention, is investigated by randomly assigning some individuals to a treatment condition and others to a control condition, and comparing the outcomes…

The group testing problem is concerned with identifying a small set of infected individuals in a large population. At our disposal is a testing procedure that allows us to test several individuals together. In an idealized setting, a test…

In applications of group testing in networks, e.g. identifying individuals who are infected by a disease spread over a network, exploiting correlation among network nodes provides fundamental opportunities in reducing the number of tests…

Group testing, a problem with diverse applications across multiple disciplines, traditionally assumes independence across nodes' states. Recent research, however, focuses on real-world scenarios that often involve correlations among nodes,…

Group testing is a screening strategy that involves dividing a population into several disjointed groups of subjects. In its simplest implementation, each group is tested with a single test in the first phase, while in the second phase only…

Researchers in many disciplines have previously used a variety of mathematical techniques for analyzing group interactions. Here we use a new metric for this purpose, called 'integrated information' or 'phi.' Phi was originally developed by…

In many mobile health interventions, treatments should only be delivered in a particular context, for example when a user is currently stressed, walking or sedentary. Even in an optimal context, concerns about user burden can restrict which…

Contact tracing has been extensively studied from different perspectives in recent years. However, there is no clear indication of why this intervention has proven effective in some epidemics (SARS) and mostly ineffective in some others…

Consider a Markovian SIR epidemic model in a homogeneous community. To this model we add a rate at which individuals are tested, and once an infectious individual tests positive it is isolated and each of their contacts are traced and…

Group testing is the combinatorial problem of identifying the defective items in a population by grouping items into test pools. Recently, nonadaptive group testing - where all the test pools must be decided on at the start - has been…

Contact tracing is one of the most important control measures deployed during epidemics. Relying on the identification of contacts of known infected individuals, it necessitates a network perspective. Although pairwise models have been used…

The pandemic in 2020 and 2021 had enormous economic and societal consequences, and studies show that contact tracing algorithms can be key in the early containment of the virus. While large strides have been made towards more effective…