Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: A key requirement in containing contagious diseases, like the 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.
Source: COVID
DOI: 10.3390/covid5090142
Language: English
Subfield: Infectious Diseases
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,207
OpenAlex ID: W4413668270