Cellular immunology data enable clinical severity prediction via supervised machine learning

초록

High-dimensional flow cytometry provides rich immunological data for examining immune responses and their relationships with disease pathology, but its complexity, heterogeneity, high-dimensionality, and modest sample sizes limit translation into clinical applications. We describe a translational immune health framework that applies supervised learning algorithms to integrate high-dimensional cellular immunology data with clinical outcomes. Using COVID-19 as a clinical scenario, we applied this framework to deep immune profiles from patients to classify disease severity and predict future severity changes from baseline profiles. We built predictive models with five supervised algorithms and interpreted associations between immune features and severity outcomes with SHapley Additive exPlanations. This approach identified immune features contributing to severity predictions and provided interpretable links between cellular immune profiles and clinical outcomes. Our findings support machine learning as a practical strategy for analyzing complex immunological data and advancing predictive modeling in translational immune health.

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