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Bosch develops rapid test for Covid-19

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Re: Bosch develops rapid test for Covid-19

#121

Post by blaeks »

globular-toast wrote: post #119
rurban wrote: post #98

This is not rapid, only 10 tests/day, whilst the current overly slow sequencers can do 200/day. The accuracy of 5% is also worse than other faster sequencers of 3%. And compare that to modern ThermalFischer parallel PCR sequencers, which operate in realtime, 25 tests in parallel, for 2.500€. That's a factor of 1000. With 10 modern sequencers per city you could test 10.000 per day, eg with drive-in. https://www.thermo…

You're forgetting the difference between bandwidth and latency.

I don't get this.

Re: Bosch develops rapid test for Covid-19

#122

Post by brian_herman__ »

rubidium wrote: post #104
rurban wrote: post #98

This is not rapid, only 10 tests/day, whilst the current overly slow sequencers can do 200/day. The accuracy of 5% is also worse than other faster sequencers of 3%. And compare that to modern ThermalFischer parallel PCR sequencers, which operate in realtime, 25 tests in parallel, for 2.500€. That's a factor of 1000. With 10 modern sequencers per city you could test 10.000 per day, eg with drive-in. https://www.thermo…

Agreed. Also the Cepheid one is faster (45 minute for point-of-care results) and has FDA approval ... not sure other advantages/disadvantages of each system though (instrument and reagent cost, # deployed units, etc). https://www.cepheid.com/coronavirus That said, it’s great to see all the companies that are putting real effort into this. This is their time to serve. My own employer has assembled a task force for rep…

cool good luck with your task force!

Re: Bosch develops rapid test for Covid-19

#123

Post by globular-toast »

blaeks wrote: post #121
globular-toast wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting the difference between bandwidth and latency.

I don't get this.

Example of low latency connection: Morse code via flashlight.

Example of high bandwidth connection: van full of books.

These are orthogonal properties and must be considered separately.

The massively parallel machines will give you 200 samples per day, but in the very best case you have to wait until the end of the day to get the first one. This technology gives you a result a couple of hours after taking the sample.

Re: Bosch develops rapid test for Covid-19

#124

Post by ballenf »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #81
halflings wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course accuracy is defined, but it's not the right metric because you usually have a large bias in the tested population: even if you only test people with symptoms, you might only have 10% of people that actually have the disease; so a test that always says "NO" would have 90% accuracy. That's why you look at True Positive Rate (sensitivity) and True Negative Rate (specificity) to factor that bias out. If TPR is…

> IF TNR is 20%, that means you'll mistakenly detect 20% of people that don't have it as infected, which would be really bad. Would it though? It's my understanding that most people who test positive are still being sent home, not forcefully hospitalized. And given that we don't actually have a widely used pharmaceutical intervention protocol, there's no side effects to worry about from false positives (eg of the opp…

If you're a healthcare worker, the cost of a false-positive could be high.

For them and others one cost is that they'll feel themselves somewhat immune when they're not and may not take precautions. It will also confuse study of the disease if it starts to look like your "2nd" infection can be much worse than your first.

Re: Bosch develops rapid test for Covid-19

#125

Post by tomcooks »

rsynnott wrote: post #103
rurban wrote: post #98

This is not rapid, only 10 tests/day, whilst the current overly slow sequencers can do 200/day. The accuracy of 5% is also worse than other faster sequencers of 3%. And compare that to modern ThermalFischer parallel PCR sequencers, which operate in realtime, 25 tests in parallel, for 2.500€. That's a factor of 1000. With 10 modern sequencers per city you could test 10.000 per day, eg with drive-in. https://www.thermo…

This is low throughput but high speed; there's a use-case for that.

Isn't that the same thing?

Re: Bosch develops rapid test for Covid-19

#126

Post by ot »

globular-toast wrote: post #119
rurban wrote: post #98

This is not rapid, only 10 tests/day, whilst the current overly slow sequencers can do 200/day. The accuracy of 5% is also worse than other faster sequencers of 3%. And compare that to modern ThermalFischer parallel PCR sequencers, which operate in realtime, 25 tests in parallel, for 2.500€. That's a factor of 1000. With 10 modern sequencers per city you could test 10.000 per day, eg with drive-in. https://www.thermo…

You're forgetting the difference between bandwidth and latency.

The machine can only do one test at a time, so throughput = 1 / latency.

Re: Bosch develops rapid test for Covid-19

#127

Post by zeroxfe »

vibrio wrote: post #117
zeroxfe wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like "Sensitivity" and "Specificity" are analogous to "Accuracy" and "Precision" typically used in data sciences.

I don't really know data science but in assay validation, sensitivity basically measures false negative rate, and specificity measures false positive rate. Accuracy and precision are measures of assay consistency or tightness. (statisticians may not purely agree with my simple explanation)

Gotcha -- specificity sounded like tightness to me. Thanks for the explanation.

Re: Bosch develops rapid test for Covid-19

#128

Post by jackallis »

this whole every-day news about rapid test dev, etc is getting frustrating. My SO is an MD in NY. All they want to hear from any company is, we have developed method that can be used to test 10k/day with results in 1 hr and will be mass producing and provding in two days.

Re: Bosch develops rapid test for Covid-19

#129

Post by _Microft »

halflings wrote: post #67
_Microft wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Wikipedia, accuracy is actually defined in this context. This does not not mean that Bosch has not used everyday speech here but it is not clear that they have. Too bad that the article does not include links to additional information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity#De...

Of course accuracy is defined, but it's not the right metric because you usually have a large bias in the tested population: even if you only test people with symptoms, you might only have 10% of people that actually have the disease; so a test that always says "NO" would have 90% accuracy. That's why you look at True Positive Rate (sensitivity) and True Negative Rate (specificity) to factor that bias out. If TPR is…

That's a good point, thanks for chiming in!

Re: Bosch develops rapid test for Covid-19

#130

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M »

I'm seeing a lot of grumbling here about this being "slow", but currently most COVID testing involves shipping samples around to remote labs. A NYT article about a hospital in Brooklyn mentioned that their samples are tested in California (!), and with these labs also inundated, average time to get a result is over a week now.

So if you can install these machines directly in hospitals, clinics etc, they will still be far faster than sending them off to a lab.

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