Analysing complex datasets while maintaining the interpretability and explainability of outcomes for clinicians and patients is challenging, not only in viral infections. These datasets often include a variety of heterogeneous clinical, demographic, laboratory, and personal data, and it is not a single factor but a combination of multiple factors that contribute to patient characterisation and host response. Therefore, multivariate approaches are needed to analyse these complex patient datasets, which are impossible to analyse with univariate comparisons (e.g., one immune cell subset versus one clinical factor). Using a SARS-CoV-2 infection as an example, we employed a patient similarity network (PSN) approach to assess the relationship between host immune factors and the clinical course of infection and performed visualisation and data interpretation. A PSN analysis of ~85 immunological (cellular and humoral) and ~70 clinical factors in 250 recruited patients with coronavirus disease (COVID-19) who were sampled four to eight weeks after a PCR-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection identified a minimal immune signature, as well as clinical and laboratory factors strongly associated with disease severity. Our study demonstrates the benefits of implementing multivariate network approaches to identify relevant factors and visualise their relationships in a SARS-CoV-2 infection, but the model is generally applicable to any complex dataset.
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