COVID-19 screening: A new model for assessing the efficiency of group testing
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How best to evaluate the performance of a group testing strategy for the SARS-CoV-2 virus? French scientist have developed a model that evaluates the efficiency of such tests. Their study accounts for dilution effect, in an effort to assess the number of potential false negatives based on pooled sample size, to optimize group size thereby minimizing epidemic risk, and finally to more accurately determine the number of contaminated individuals within a given population.
Researchers have proposed a new quantitative strategy for pooling COVID-19 tests in order to monitor spread and detect outbreaks early within closed communities, such as nursing homes or universities. Vincent Brault of Université Grenoble Alpes in Grenoble, France, and colleagues present this method in the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology.
Existing gene drive technologies could be combined to help control the invasive grey squirrel population in the UK with little risk to other populations, according to a modelling study published in Scientific Reports.
In "Subverting Privacy-Preserving GANs: Hiding Secrets in Sanitized Images," researchers at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering led by Siddharth Garg, professor of electrical and computer engineering, explored whether private data could still be recovered from images that had been "sanitized" by such deep-learning discriminators as privacy protecting GANs (PP-GANs).
In presentations at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting, researchers argued that mathematics can help explain and predict those breakdowns, potentially offering new ways of treating the systems to prevent or fix them when things go wrong.
MIT researchers have simulated a soft-bodied robot that turns rigid on demand. The advance may help broaden robots' range of tasks and allow for safe interactions with people, including in patient care settings.
Using anonymized policyholder data from Swiss insurance company La Mobilière, EPFL scientists were able to predict a number of socio-economic indicators in 170 Swiss towns. This innovative approach could help increase the granularity and applicability of official statistics.
Connected, automated vehicles promise to save energy and improve safety. Michigan Tech engineers propose a modeling framework for cooperative driving. Simulation results show that the cooperative automated eco-driving algorithm saves energy -- 7% under light traffic and 23% under heavy traffic.
Researchers from Skoltech's Intelligent Space Robotics Lab have proposed a novel method for customer behavior analytics and demand distribution based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) stocktaking.
In a new article published in Cancer Immunology Research, the Moffitt team shows that sequential administration of immunotherapy followed by targeted therapy prolongs anti-tumor responses in preclinical models and may be a potential treatment option for patients with advanced melanoma.