A Deep Representation Learning Method for Quantitative Immune Defense Function Evaluation and Its Clinical Applications

The immune defense function protecting the body from invasive pathogens is a key indicator of an individual's health and lacks of methods for quantitative evaluation. This study introduces ImmuDef, a novel algorithm for precisely and quantitatively assessing anti-infection immune defense function based on RNA-seq data. ImmuDef selects immune signatures through comparisons of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) or severe sepsis vs. healthy controls (HC) and reduces dimension to construct a latent space via a variational autoencoder (VAE) model (QImmuDef-VAE), a representation deep learning model. Based on this model, a defense immune score (DImmuScore) was calculated by measuring the distance between a patient and HC within latent space. We validated ImmuDef on 3202 samples across four immune states: immunodeficiency, immunocompromised, immunocompetent, and immunoactive. As a result, DImmuScore achieves high classification accuracy (mean accuracy: 71.75%-76.25%) among samples with various immune states and infections. Furthermore, DImmuScore can serve as a metric for infectious disease severity, where its gradient directly quantifies disease severity. As an application, DImmuScore can be a strong prognostic indicator, effectively stratifying mortality/survival in both sepsis and COVID-19 patients with no symptomatic difference. This framework was validated across five infectious diseases, establishing the first quantitative standard for cross-disease immune defense assessment.