ArticleBMC medical research methodology2021
Group testing can improve the cost-efficiency of prospective-retrospective biomarker studies.
Article in BMC medical research methodology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Multiple Summary Knowledge-Based Disease Prevalence Estimation for Group Testing Data.Statistics in medicine · 2026Article
- A scenario-drafting study to explore potential future implementation pathways of circulating tumor DNA testing in oncology.Molecular oncology · 2024Article
- Using group testing in a two-phase epidemiologic design to identify the effects of a large number of antibody reactions on disease risk.BMC medical research methodology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundCancer treatment is increasingly dependent on biomarkers for prognostication and treatment selection. Potential biomarkers are frequently evaluated in prospective-retrospective studies in which biomarkers are measured retrospectively on archived specimens after completion of prospective clinical trials. In light of the high costs of some assays, random sampling designs have been proposed that measure biomarkers for a random sub-sample of subjects selected on the basis of observed outcome and possibly other variables. Compared with a standard design that measures biomarkers on all subjects, a random sampling design can be cost-efficient in the sense of reducing the cost of the study substantially while achieving a reasonable level of precision.
methodsFor a biomarker that indicates the presence of some molecular alteration (e.g., mutation in a gene), we explore the use of a group testing strategy, which involves physically pooling specimens across subjects and assaying pooled samples for the presence of the molecular alteration of interest, for further improvement in cost-efficiency beyond random sampling. We propose simple and general approaches to estimating the prognostic and predictive values of biomarkers with group testing, and conduct simulation studies to validate the proposed estimation procedures and to assess the cost-efficiency of the group testing design in comparison to the standard and random sampling designs.
resultsSimulation results show that the proposed estimation procedures perform well in realistic settings and that a group testing design can have considerably higher cost-efficiency than a random sampling design.
conclusionsGroup testing can be used to improve the cost-efficiency of biomarker studies.
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Registered trials
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