Department of Family Medicine, Zhongxing Branch, Taipei City Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.
Institute of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Front Public Health. 2022 Oct 19;10:994712. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.994712. eCollection 2022.
The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic can be effectively controlled by rapid and accurate identification of SARS-CoV-2-infected cases through large-scale screening. Hypercube pooling polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is frequently used as a pooling technique because of its high speed and efficiency. We attempted to implement the hypercube pooling strategy and found it had a large quantization effect. This raised two questions: is hypercube pooling with edge = 3 actually the optimal strategy? If not, what is the best edge and dimension? We used a C++ program to calculate the expected number of PCR tests per patient for different values of prevalence, edge, and dimension. The results showed that every edge had a best performance range. Then, using C++ again, we created a program to calculate the optimal edge and dimension required for pooling samples when entering prevalence into our program. Our program will be provided as freeware in the hope that it can help governments fight the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
严重急性呼吸综合征冠状病毒 2（SARS-CoV-2）大流行可以通过大规模筛查快速准确地识别 SARS-CoV-2 感染病例来有效控制。超立方体池化聚合酶链反应（PCR）因其速度快、效率高而常被用作池化技术。我们尝试实施超立方体池化策略，发现其具有较大的量化效果。这提出了两个问题：超立方体池化边缘 = 3 是否真的是最优策略？如果不是，最佳的边缘和维度是多少？我们使用 C++程序计算了不同流行率、边缘和维度下每个患者的 PCR 检测次数的预期值。结果表明，每条边缘都有一个最佳性能范围。然后，我们再次使用 C++创建一个程序，以便在将流行率输入到我们的程序时计算池化样本所需的最佳边缘和维度。我们将提供该程序的免费软件，希望它能帮助政府抗击 SARS-CoV-2 大流行。
