title: Objective evaluation of two markers of HIV-1 infection (p24 antigen concentration and CD4+ cell counts) by a self organizing neural network.
abstract: The aim of the present work is to obtain groups of patients with similar profiles of p24 antigen concentration and of CD4+ cell counts. These two markers were chosen because their evaluation represents a significant step in the clinical follow up of HIV-1 infected subjects. The detection methods for p24 antigen concentration and for CD4+ cell counts are well assessed and guarantee easy reproducibility of data obtained in different laboratories. A set of observations with the same time intervals were derived from a continuous function obtained for each patient by a back-propagation neural net trained on the raw data from the patient. The classifications were obtained by a Kohonen neural net trained in three ways: with p24 antigen profiles only, with CD4+ cell count profiles only and with both sets of profiles. The results show that the clustering fashion of the two parameters closely resembles the clustering fashion of CD4+ only, rather than that of p24Ag, both with reference to cluster formation and with reference to distances between clusters.
authors.affiliation: DIST, Department of Communications Computer and System Sciences, University of Genova, Italy.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Giacomini
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Ruggiero
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Maillard
authors.forename: F B
authors.initials: FB
authors.lastname: Lillo
authors.forename: O E
authors.initials: OE
authors.lastname: Varnier
mesh_terms: D000163:Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000276:immunology; D015415:Biomarkers / Q000032:analysis; D018791:CD4 Lymphocyte Count; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D003936:Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted; D016655:HIV Core Protein p24 / Q000032:analysis*; D015497:HIV-1 / Q000276:immunology*; D006801:Humans; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer
chemical_list: D015415:Biomarkers; D016655:HIV Core Protein p24