The Team

Cristina Prat

Head of Section of Respiratory tract infection and Mycobacteria at Hospital Universitari Germans Trias i Pujol

Alicia Lacoma

Post-doctoral CIBERES researcher

Our objective

One of the fundamental objectives of the research group is the study of host-pathogen interactions during lower respiratory tract infections and tuberculosis in order to find novel targets for improving diagnosis and treatment.

The main objective of this study was to evaluate the potential relationships between clinical/epidemiological data and genetical microbial features in a cohort of patients under mechanical ventilation and isolation of Staphylococcus aureus in the respiratory tract .

We combined up to 136 variables related to demographics, clinical evolution, severity scores, biomarkers, follow-up and DNA microbial array from 148 patients.

Given the exhaustive exploratory approach of this study, the complex list of clinical and microbiological variables and the large number of possible patient stratification factors, we decided to apply and automated EDA tool like .

Which Was The Contribution Of ?

helped us unveiling a clinically relevant association between the consecutive isolation of Pseudomonas aeruginosa with a significantly larger number of days of persistence. Other associations found involved the presence of specific bacterial genes and clinical variables. Some of these associations were only reported in specific patients subgroups

In this work, we first employed a classical statistical package selecting specific variables collected, and later performed an extensive automated exploratory data analysis combining all host and pathogen data collected.

Which Was The Contribution Of ?

Key Features

The key features of applied to this work were

• 1 The non-guided exploratory strategy proposed by the software, which has proved its effectiveness to analyze and compare multiple variables starting with a set of exploratory questions.
• 2 The automated data consolidation tool made combining variables collected in different databases and formats easier and faster.
• 3 The post-analysis exclusivity assessment, which allowed us to identify unique associations between study subgroups.