论文标题
多级组测试,并应用于单发汇总的COVID-19测试
Multi-Level Group Testing with Application to One-Shot Pooled COVID-19 Tests
论文作者
论文摘要
含有传染性疾病的关键要求,例如2019年冠状病毒病(Covid-19)大流行,是对大量人群有效进行大规模诊断的能力。某些领先的测试程序,例如利用定性聚合酶链反应的测试程序,涉及使用专用机械,可以同时处理有限的样品。增加测试吞吐量的一种候选方法是检查由不同患者的样品混合物组成的合并样品。在这项工作中,我们研究了基于池的测试,这些测试以一种单发的方式进行,同时不仅提供了感染的存在,而是在COVID-19测试中经常需要的其他池测试的水平,而没有其他池测试。由于这些要求限制了传统的小组测试(GT)方法的应用,因此我们提出了一种多级GT方案,该方案以GT原则为基础,可以使用比患者少得多的测试来准确恢复,同时以一种发射的方式进行操作并提供多层次的指示。我们提供了对拟议方案的理论分析,并表征了算法可靠地运行的条件,以负担得起的计算复杂性。我们的数值结果表明,多级GT可以准确有效地检测感染水平,同时比先前提出的一声COVID-19的合并测试方法提高了性能。
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 those utilizing qualitative polymerase chain reaction, involve using dedicated machinery which can simultaneously process a limited amount of samples. A candidate method to increase the test throughput is to examine pooled samples comprised of a mixture of samples from different patients. In this work we study pooling based tests which operate in a one-shot fashion, while providing an indication not solely on the presence of infection, but also on its level, without additional pool tests, as often required in COVID-19 testing. As these requirements limit the application of traditional group-testing (GT) methods, we propose a multi-level GT scheme, which builds upon GT principles to enable accurate recovery using much fewer tests than patients, while operating in a one-shot manner and providing multi-level indications. We provide a theoretical analysis of the proposed scheme and characterize conditions under which the algorithm operates reliably and at affordable computational complexity. Our numerical results demonstrate that multi level GT accurately and efficiently detects infection levels, while achieving improved performance over previously proposed one-shot COVID-19 pooled-testing methods.