Abstract：
Regular health monitoring is crucial in laboratory animal facilities to determine the presence or absence of specific pathogens. One common approach to monitoring involves the use of sentinel animals, which are periodically exposed to biological material from the cages being monitored. At a certain point, some of these sentinel animals are tested for pathogens. This article discusses designing an effective sampling scheme to meet desired quality standards. It addresses questions such as the number of sentinel animals required, the frequency of sampling biological material, the selection of cages based on facility set-up, and the optimal frequency and quantity of sentinel animal tests. While existing design formulas are available for simple random sampling, no quantitative recommendation exists for using sentinel animals to the best of our knowledge. We propose a Monte Carlo simulation-based approach in this article to address this. Our algorithm has been implemented in a publicly accessible web page at http://nolan.cnb.csic.es/sentinelcagesmanager.
摘要：
在实验动物设施中，定期进行健康监测对于确定特定病原体的存在与否至关重要。一种常见的监测方法是使用前哨动物，它们定期暴露于被监测的笼子里的生物材料。在某一点上,其中一些前哨动物接受了病原体测试。本文讨论了设计有效的采样方案以满足所需的质量标准。它解决了诸如所需哨兵动物数量等问题，采样生物材料的频率，根据设施设置选择笼子，以及前哨动物试验的最佳频率和数量。虽然现有的设计公式可用于简单的随机抽样，据我们所知，没有定量建议使用前哨动物。本文提出了一种基于蒙特卡罗模拟的方法来解决这个问题。我们的算法已在http://nolan的可公开访问的网页中实现。cnb.csic.es/sentinelcagesmanager。
