Blood tests have an essential part in everyday medicine and are used by doctors in several diagnostic procedures. Still, this data is multivariate – and often some diseases, like COVID-19,… Click to show full abstract
Blood tests have an essential part in everyday medicine and are used by doctors in several diagnostic procedures. Still, this data is multivariate – and often some diseases, like COVID-19, could have different symptom manifestation 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%, meaning 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 tests 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.
               
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