论文标题
修改的多夫曼（Dorfman）程序，用于稀释的泳池测试
Modified Dorfman procedure for pool tests with dilution -- COVID-19 case study
论文作者
论文摘要
全球Covid-19大流行的爆发导致对大量患者在存在SARS-COV-2冠状病毒的快速和有效测试中的前所未有的需求。除了对单个测试的成本和速度进行技术改进之外，还可以使用池测试来提高人口测试的效率和吞吐量。 Dorfman池测试过程是这种最著名和研究的方法之一。但是，此过程是基于不切实际的假设，即泳池测试具有完美的灵敏度，唯一的目标是最大程度地减少测试数量，并且不太适应不完美的池测试。我们提出和分析了对此过程的简单修改，在该过程中，对池的测试进行负结果的测试将独立重复多次。在一项计算研究中，使用有关SARS-COV-2 PCR检验稀释效应的最新数据评估了该程序，这表明所提出的方法大大减少了假阴性的数量，而测试数量的增加相对较小，尤其是对于较小的患病率。例如，对于患病率0.001，可以将测试数量减少到单个测试的22.1％，将预期的假阴性数量增加不超过1％，而单个测试的16.8％增加了预期的假阴性数量的数量不超过10％。同时，标准Dorfman程序中预期的测试数量的类似减少将分别产生675％和821％的预期假否定数量。这使得在Covid-19这样的疾病的情况下，提出的程序成为筛查测试的有趣选择。
The outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic results in unprecedented demand for fast and efficient testing of large numbers of patients for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Beside technical improvements of the cost and speed of individual tests, pool testing may be used to improve efficiency and throughput of a population test. Dorfman pool testing procedure is one of the best known and studied methods of this kind. This procedure is, however, based on unrealistic assumptions that the pool test has perfect sensitivity and the only objective is to minimize the number of tests, and is not well adapted to the case of imperfect pool tests. We propose and analyze a simple modification of this procedure in which test of a pool with negative result is independently repeated up to several times. The proposed procedure is evaluated in a computational study using recent data about dilution effect for SARS-CoV-2 PCR tests, showing that the proposed approach significantly reduces the number of false negatives with a relatively small increase of the number of tests, especially for small prevalence rates. For example, for prevalence rate 0.001 the number of tests could be reduced to 22.1% of individual tests, increasing the expected number of false negatives by no more than 1%, and to 16.8% of individual tests increasing the expected number of false negatives by no more than 10%. At the same time, a similar reduction of the expected number of tests in the standard Dorfman procedure would yield 675% and 821% increase of the expected number of false negatives, respectively. This makes the proposed procedure an interesting choice for screening tests in the case of diseases like COVID-19.
