Fig. 1.

Analysis pipeline to identify plasma inflammatory biomarkers with biological or clinical relevance in HIV patients on ART. Flowchart illustrates workflow to address issues important for inflammatory biomarker study design (yellow boxes), sample collection and immunoassays (green boxes), and data pre-processing and analysis (blue boxes) to reduce sources of noise frequently encountered in inflammatory biomarker studies in HIV-positive cohorts. Addressing these issues in study design, implementation, and data analysis will increase the chance of identifying inflammatory biomarkers with biological or clinical significance. Similar workflows were used in prior studies to identify inflammatory biomarkers associated with neurocognitive impairment and other clinical endpoints in HIV patients on ART (Lyons et al. 2011; Kamat et al. 2012a, b; Cassol et al. 2013)