Using bi-dimensional representations to understand patterns in COVID-19 blood exam data

Blood tests play an essential role in everyday medicine and are used by doctors in several diagnostic procedures. Moreover, this data is multivariate – and often some diseases, such as COVID-19, could have different symptom manifestations and outcomes. This study proposes a method of extracting usef...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Vitor P. Bezzan, Cleber D. Rocco
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2022-01-01
Series:Informatics in Medicine Unlocked
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352914821002902
Description
Summary:Blood tests play an essential role in everyday medicine and are used by doctors in several diagnostic procedures. Moreover, this data is multivariate – and often some diseases, such as COVID-19, could have different symptom manifestations and outcomes. This study proposes a method of extracting useful information from blood tests using UMAP technique - Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction combined with DBSCAN clustering and statistical approaches. The analysis performed here indicates several clusters of infection prevalence varying between 2%–37%, showing that our procedure is indeed capable of finding different patterns. A possible explanation is that COVID-19 is not just a respiratory infection but a systemic disease with critical hematological implications, primarily on white-cell fractions, as indicated by relevant statistical test p-values in the range of 0.03–0.1. The novel analysis procedure proposed could be adopted in other data-sets of different illnesses to help researchers to discover new patterns of data that could be used in various diseases and contexts.
ISSN:2352-9148