Estimating the prevalence of multiple diseases from two-stage hierarchical pooling.

ABSTRACT: Testing protocols in large-scale sexually transmitted disease screening applications often involve pooling biospecimens (e.g., blood, urine, and swabs) to lower costs and to increase the number of individuals who can be tested. With the recent development of assays that detect multiple diseases, it is now common to test biospecimen pools for multiple infections simultaneously. Recent work has developed an expectation-maximization algorithm to estimate the prevalence of two infections using a two-stage, Dorfman-type testing algorithm motivated by current screening practices for chlamydia and gonorrhea in the USA. In this article, we have the same goal but instead take a more flexible Bayesian approach. Doing so allows us to incorporate information about assay uncertainty during the testing

SUBMITTER: Warasi MS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4965323 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature