| Paper ID | BIO-3.1 |
| Paper Title |
Multi-Level Group Testing with Application to One-Shot Pooled COVID-19 Tests |
| Authors |
Alejandro Cohen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States; Nir Shlezinger, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel; Amit Solomon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States; Yonina C. Eldar, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel; Muriel Medard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States |
| Session | BIO-3: Machine Learning for COVID-19 diagnosis |
| Location | Gather.Town |
| Session Time: | Tuesday, 08 June, 13:00 - 13:45 |
| Presentation Time: | Tuesday, 08 June, 13:00 - 13:45 |
| Presentation |
Poster
|
| Topic |
Biomedical Imaging and Signal Processing: [BIO] Biomedical signal processing |
| IEEE Xplore Open Preview |
Click here to view in IEEE Xplore |
| Virtual Presentation |
Click here to watch in the Virtual Conference |
| Abstract |
One of the main challenges in containing the Coronoavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic stems from the difficulty in carrying out efficient mass diagnosis over large populations. The leading method to test for COVID-19 infection utilizes qualitative polymerase chain reaction, implemented using dedicated machinery which can simultaneously process a limited amount of samples. A candidate method to increase the test throughput is to examine pooled samples comprised of a mixture of samples from different patients. In this work, we study pooling-based COVID-19 tests. We identify the specific requirements of COVID-19 testing, including the need to characterize the infection level and to operate in a one-shot fashion, which limit the application of traditional group-testing (GT) methods. We then propose a multi-level GT scheme, designed specifically to meet the unique requirements of COVID-19 tests, while exploiting the strength of GT theory to enable accurate recovery using much fewer tests than patients. Our numerical results demonstrate that multi-level GT reliably and efficiently detects the infection levels, while achieving improved accuracy over previously proposed one-shot COVID-19 pooled-testing methods. |
