Integration of Unpaired and Heterogeneous Clinical Flow Cytometry Data

We introduce the Unbiasing Variational Autoencoder (UVAE), a computational framework for the integration of unpaired biomedical data streams such as clinical flow cytometry. UVAE addresses batch effect correction and data alignment by training a semi-supervised model on partially labelled datasets, enabling simultaneous normalisation and integration of diverse data within a shared latent space. The framework implements a probabilistic model for batch effect normalisation and balances class contents during training to ensure accurate representation of underlying cell composition. We apply UVAE to integrate heterogeneous clinical flow cytometry data from COVID-19 patients. The integrated data enhances the statistical signal of cell types associated with disease severity, enables clustering of subpopulations without the impediment of batch effects, and improves the performance of longitudinal regression for predicting peak disease severity from temporal patient samples.