Validation of a Portable System for Molecular Diagnostics of SARS-CoV-2

• Activity Number: 158 - Statistical Methods for High-Dimensional Data in Health Care and Medical Research
• Type: Topic-Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 10, 2021 : 10:00 AM to 11:50 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Claudia Wehrhahn* and Maricarmen Quirasco Baruch and Luis Vaca Domínguez
• Companies: University of California, Santa Cruz and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
• Keywords: disease diagnosis; medical test evaluations; Bayesian nonparametric; Dirichlet process mixture models

Abstract

During the last year the world has been impacted by the worst pandemic in the last 100 years. A key factor in controlling the spread of the virus has been the early diagnose of patients. In this talk we present a new molecular diagnose test for SARS-CoV-2, called esPCR, and validate its use. The new method is portable, fast, and inexpensive. We evaluate the accuracy of the esPCR diagnosis method in the presence of the gold-standard test, known as PCR, by means of the receiver operating characteristics curve modeled under a Bayesian nonparametric approach. The method is illustrated in a real data set obtained from a Mexican hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as in simulated data sets.