McMahan Christopher S, Tebbs Joshua M, Bilder Christopher R
Department of Statistics, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina 29208, USA.
Biometrics. 2012 Mar;68(1):287-96. doi: 10.1111/j.1541-0420.2011.01644.x. Epub 2011 Jul 15.
Since the early 1940s, group testing (pooled testing) has been used to reduce costs in a variety of applications, including infectious disease screening, drug discovery, and genetics. In such applications, the goal is often to classify individuals as positive or negative using initial group testing results and the subsequent process of decoding of positive pools. Many decoding algorithms have been proposed, but most fail to acknowledge, and to further exploit, the heterogeneous nature of the individuals being screened. In this article, we use individuals' risk probabilities to formulate new informative decoding algorithms that implement Dorfman retesting in a heterogeneous population. We introduce the concept of "thresholding" to classify individuals as "high" or "low risk," so that separate, risk-specific algorithms may be used, while simultaneously identifying pool sizes that minimize the expected number of tests. When compared to competing algorithms which treat the population as homogeneous, we show that significant gains in testing efficiency can be realized with virtually no loss in screening accuracy. An important additional benefit is that our new procedures are easy to implement. We apply our methods to chlamydia and gonorrhea data collected recently in Nebraska as part of the Infertility Prevention Project.
自20世纪40年代初以来,分组检测(混合检测)已被用于在包括传染病筛查、药物研发和遗传学等各种应用中降低成本。在这类应用中,目标通常是利用初始分组检测结果以及随后对阳性组的解码过程将个体分类为阳性或阴性。已经提出了许多解码算法,但大多数算法未能认识到并进一步利用被筛查个体的异质性。在本文中,我们使用个体的风险概率来制定新的信息丰富的解码算法,这些算法在异质人群中实施 Dorfman 复检。我们引入“阈值化”概念将个体分类为“高”或“低风险”,以便可以使用单独的、针对风险的算法,同时确定使预期检测次数最小化的组大小。与将人群视为同质的竞争算法相比,我们表明在几乎不损失筛查准确性的情况下可以实现检测效率的显著提高。一个重要的额外好处是我们的新程序易于实施。我们将我们的方法应用于最近在内布拉斯加州收集的衣原体和淋病数据,这些数据是不孕预防项目的一部分。