Fig. 4. Cytokine clustering and functional analysis in COVID-19 patients.

Heatmap represents an unsupervised clustering of the Luminex Assay analytes in 44 patients (every vertical line indicates one patient). On top of the severity, age, and HT clinical characteristics of each patient are reported as color codes according to the legend on the right. Clusterings were calculated using the “hclust” function of the R package “stats” according to the “ward.D2” method applied to “manhattan” distances and visualized through the ‘heatmap3’ package. Black arrows indicate the 5 cytokines correlating simultaneously with Age/HT/DS (A). Network integration for the 5 cytokines correlating simultaneously with Age/HT/DS, the connections were built by physical interactions (Red lines), and Pathway association (Green lines), main biological functions enrichment are listed (right) (B), analysis was performed using GeneMANIA algorithm.