RAPID: Accelerated Testing for COVID-19 using Group Testing

Computer and Information Science and Engineering - COVID-19 has resulted in an unprecedented global health crisis that may become even more widespread over the upcoming months. Extensive and immediate testing of symptomatic and asymptomatic people is known to be important for implementing containment policies and to ensure that medical resources can be apportioned to different geographic regions appropriately. Individual testing can provide the necessary information; however, this requires enormous amounts of medical and human resources. This project will facilitate widespread testing for COVID-19 while using fewer tests. The main approach is based on the idea of pooling samples from multiple patients and performing tests on combined samples. If the result of a test is negative, one can conclude that no one in the pool is infected, and if the result is positive, then further fine-grained testing can be performed. Pooling-based testing, also known as group testing, can be very effective in reducing the number of tests required for both identifying infected people in a population and for obtaining coarse-grained population-level information about infection rates. In this project, effective group-testing schemes that minimize the total number of tests required and/or the total time taken to conduct tests will be designed, and their performance will be analyzed.

In this project, group-testing schemes that do not require precise knowledge of the infection rates and multi-stage group-testing schemes will be designed and optimized. The trade-off between the number of tests required and the total time taken to complete testing will also be characterized. The robustness of group-testing schemes to correlation in the infection status among the tested population and to errors in the tests will be studied. Using mathematical tools from group testing and hypothesis testing, strategies for rapid classification of infection rates will also be designed and analyzed. Finally, a smart-phone application which guides laboratory technicians through the group-testing process will be developed. The focus will be on small pool sizes and population sizes. Successful completion of the proposed activities in this project will advance the state of the art in the field of group testing, and provide practical and efficient solutions for COVID-19 testing.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.