Semi-Quantitative Group Testing for Efficient and Accurate qPCR Screening of Pathogens with a Wide Range of Loads
Pathogenic infections pose a significant threat to global health, affecting millions of people every year and presenting substantial challenges to healthcare systems worldwide. Efficient and timely testing plays a critical role in disease control and transmission prevention. Group testing is a well-established method for reducing the number of tests needed to screen large populations when the disease prevalence is low. However, it does not fully utilize the quantitative information provided by qPCR methods, nor is it able to accommodate a wide range of pathogen loads. To address these issues, we introduce a novel adaptive semi-quantitative group testing (SQGT) scheme to efficiently screen populations via two-stage qPCR testing. The SQGT method quantizes cycle threshold ($Ct$) values into multiple bins, leveraging the information from the first stage of screening to improve the detection sensitivity. Dynamic $Ct$ threshold adjustments mitigate dilution effects and enhance test accuracy. Comparisons with traditional binary outcome GT methods show that SQGT reduces the number of tests by $24$% while maintaining a negligible false negative rate.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
AC-DC: Amplification Curve Diagnostics for Covid-19 Group Testing
The first part of the paper presents a review of the gold-standard testing protocol for Covid-19, real-time, reverse transcriptase PCR, and its properties and associated measurement data such as amplification curves that…
Absolute quantification of real-time PCR data with stage signal difference analysis
Real-time PCR, or Real-time Quantitative PCR (qPCR) is an effective approach to quantify nucleic acid samples. Given the complicated reaction system along with thermal cycles, there has been long-term confusion on accura…
ABCTracker: an easy-to-use, cloud-based application for tracking multiple objects
Visual multi-object tracking has the potential to accelerate many forms of quantitative analyses, especially in research communities investigating the motion, behavior, or social interactions within groups of animals. De…
Multi-Object TrackingObjectObject TrackingTropical Group Testing
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 ou…
compressed sensingVerifiable Deep Quantitative Group Testing
We present a neural network-based framework for solving the quantitative group testing (QGT) problem that achieves both high decoding accuracy and structural verifiability. In QGT, the objective is to identify a small su…