Lyme Disease Confirmatory Western Blot Is Redundant for Screen Negative Samples in Low Endemic Areas, British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Borrelia burgdorferi sensu stricto is the causative agent of Lyme disease (LD). Possible early symptoms include flu-like symptoms and erythema migrans and later, the risk of disruption of the nervous system, joints, and heart. A two-tiered testing method is employed for serological diagnostics. The Public Health Agency of Canada guidelines recommend that samples tested negative on first-tiered test need not be confirmed by second-tiered test. Due to the challenging nature of diagnosis leading to misconceptions among physicians about false negatives, confirmatory testing is requested despite the initial negative result. Methods: Hundred screen-negative Lyme patient samples from 2007 to 2016 were tested by Western blot (WB) second-tiered confirmatory test upon physician’s request in British Columbia to study the first-tiered screening test sufficiency. Results: Those negative for first-tiered enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay were also negative by WB. Conclusion: Results demonstrate that confirmatory testing is not necessary on screen-negative samples. Hence, first-tiered test is sufficient to rule out LD.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".