Plenaries
The Shapes of Immunological Data during Respiratory Infections
Pathogens have important implications in many aspects of health, epidemiology, and evolution. Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is used here to identify the behavior of a biological system from a global perspective. Using data sets of the immune response during influenza-pneumococcal co-infection in mice and kinetic data of COVID-19 patients with different disease severity, we employ the mapper algorithm to simplify and visualize high dimensional data sets. Persistent shapes of the simplicial complexes of the data in the infection scenarios are found. In this talk, we will hypothesize that the shape of the infection impacts immunity and subsequent severity.
