Medical diagnostic testing can be made significantly more efficient using pooled testing protocols. These typically require a sparse infection signal and use either binary or real-valued entries of O(1). However, existing methods do not allow for inferring viral loads which span many orders of magnitude. We develop a message passing algorithm coupled with a PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) specific noise function to allow accurate inference of realistic viral load signals. This work is in the non-adaptive setting and could open the possibility of efficient screening where viral load determination is clinically important.

翻译：医学诊断检测可通过池化检测方案显著提高效率。这类方案通常要求感染信号具有稀疏性，并使用O(1)的二元或实值条目。然而，现有方法无法推断跨越多个数量级的病毒载量。我们开发了一种消息传递算法，结合PCR（聚合酶链式反应）特定噪声函数，以实现对真实病毒载量信号的精确推断。此项研究基于非自适应设置，有望为病毒载量判定具有临床重要性的高效筛查开辟可能性。