Covid-19 diagnosis by combining RT-PCR and pseudo-convolutional machines to characterize virus sequences

Abstract The Covid-19 pandemic, a disease transmitted by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has already caused the infection of more than 120 million people, of which 70 million have been recovered, while 3 million people have died. The high speed of infection has led to the rapid depletion of public health resources in most countries. RT-PCR is Covid-19’s reference diagnostic method. In this work we propose a new technique for representing DNA sequences: they are divided into smaller sequences with overlap in a pseudo-convolutional approach and represented by co-occurrence matrices. This technique eliminates multiple sequence alignment. Through the proposed method, it is possible to identify virus sequences from a large database: 347,363 virus DNA sequences from 24 virus families and SARS-CoV-2. When comparing SARS-CoV-2 with virus families with similar symptoms, we obtained $$0.97 \pm 0.03$$ 0.97 ± 0.03 for sensitivity and $$0.9919 \pm 0.0005$$ 0.9919 ± 0.0005 for specificity with MLP classifier and 30% overlap. When SARS-CoV-2 is compared to other coronaviruses and healthy human DNA sequences, we obtained $$0.99 \pm 0.01$$ 0.99 ± 0.01 for sensitivity and $$0.9986 \pm 0.0002$$ 0.9986 ± 0.0002 for specificity with MLP and 50% overlap. Therefore, the molecular diagnosis of Covid-19 can be optimized by combining RT-PCR and our pseudo-convolutional method to identify DNA sequences for SARS-CoV-2 with greater specificity and sensitivity.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

1. 7.

   Real-Time Reverse Transcription–Polymerase Chain Reaction Assay for SARS-associated Coronavirus · 2004

2. 10.

   SMOTE for high-dimensional class-imbalanced data · 2013

3. 49.
   Expression of concern

   Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR · 2020

4. 53.

   Development and clinical application of a rapid IgM‐IgG combined antibody test for SARS‐CoV‐2 infection diagnosis · 2020

5. 63.

   Report from the American Society for Microbiology COVID-19 International Summit, 23 March 2020: Value of Diagnostic Testing for SARS–CoV-2/COVID-19 · 2020

6. 65.

   The effect of human mobility and control measures on the COVID-19 epidemic in China · 2020

7. 88.

   A Review on Deep Learning Techniques for the Diagnosis of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) · 2021

89 more references, whose wording the paper’s licence keeps private.

A person counts once a day per paper. We keep no cookie and no address: a reader is a hash that changes every day. Any month under five reads shows no number.