title: A method to derive the time of onset of infection from serological findings.
abstract: Among the diagnostic problems requiring a retrospective assessment of the time an event occurred is that of screening for primary infection with Toxoplasma gondii acquired during pregnancy. We suggest a method to derive the possible times of onset of infection from a small sequence of serological samples by matching them against the knowledge about possible courses of infection. Special care is taken to properly address the relative change of consecutive samples, a nontrivial problem when reasoning about sparsely sampled time courses. To investigate the practicability of our approach we conducted a retrospective and a simulated prospective evaluation based on the samples of 394 pregnancies, randomly selected from our toxoplasmosis database; we could demonstrate an overall accuracy of 95.7%.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Medical Informatics, University of Hildesheim, Germany.
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Steimann
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hayde
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008432:Mathematical Computing; D011247:Pregnancy; D015597:Pregnancy Complications, Parasitic / Q000175:diagnosis*; D012698:Serologic Tests; D013997:Time Factors; D014123:Toxoplasmosis / Q000175:diagnosis*