Informative Array Screening

• Activity Number: 257
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 2, 2010 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Christopher Steven McMahan* and Joshua Tebbs+
• Companies: University of South Carolina and University of South Carolina
• Keywords: Array testing ; Group testing ; Infertility and Prevention Project ; Pooled testing

Abstract

Since the advent of group testing, there have been many successful methodological applications of pooling to problems such as infectious disease screening. In many of these applications, the goal is to identify the individual as either positive or negative through initial testing responses of groups and the subsequent process of decoding positive pools. There have been many decoding procedures suggested, although all of these procedures fail to acknowledge, and to further exploit, the heterogeneous nature of the individuals. In our work, we utilize the individuals' positive probabilistic status to drive an informed array decoding procedure. Our testing procedure's efficiency is then illustrated through simulation and is further applied to a chlamydia and gonorrhea study. This work shows that our approach provides gains in reducing testing expenditures in comparison to other methods.