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Entropy of leukemia on multidimensional morphological and molecular landscapes
Leukemia epitomizes the class of highly complex diseases that new
technologies aim to tackle by using large sets of single-cell level
information. Achieving such goal depends critically not only on experimental
techniques but also on approaches to interpret the data. A most pressing issue
is to identify the salient quantitative features of the disease from the
resulting massive amounts of information. Here, I show that the entropies of
cell-population distributions on specific multidimensional molecular and
morphological landscapes provide a set of measures for the precise
characterization of normal and pathological states, such as those corresponding
to healthy individuals and acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients. I provide a
systematic procedure to identify the specific landscapes and illustrate how,
applied to cell samples from peripheral blood and bone marrow aspirates, this
characterization accurately diagnoses AML from just flow cytometry data. The
methodology can generally be applied to other types of cell-populations and
establishes a straightforward link between the traditional statistical
thermodynamics methodology and biomedical applications.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, and supplementary informatio
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