Group Testing with Correlated Responses

• Activity Number: 282
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 3, 2010 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: ENAR
• Author(s): Samuel Lendle and Michael G. Hudgens*+
• Companies: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Abstract

Pooling of specimens to increase efficiency of screening individuals for rare diseases has a long history, dating back to screening for syphilis in military inductees in the 1940s. Subsequently, specimen pooling or "group testing" has been applied to screening for many other infectious diseases, and has also found broader application in entomology, screening for genetic mutations, the blood bank and pharmaceutical industries and many other areas. In this talk we will discuss the ramifications of correlated responses on the efficiencies of several different group testing algorithms. This work is motivated by peptide pooling algorithms used in epitope mapping studies of HIV vaccines. In that setting, immune responses to certain peptides are likely correlated, rendering dubious the usual independence assumption underlying most group testing efficiency calculations.