OBJECTIVE EVALUATION OF 2 MARKERS OF HIV-1 INFECTION (P24 ANTIGEN CONCENTRATION AND CD4-ORGANIZING NEURAL-NETWORK( CELL COUNTS) BY A SELF)

The aim of the present work is to obtain groups of patients with simil ar profiles of p24 antigen concentration and of CD4+ cell counts. Thes e two markers were chosen because their evaluation represents a signif icant step in the clinical follow up of HIV-1 infected subjects. The d etection methods for p24 antigen concentration and for CD4+ cell count s are well assessed and guarantee easy reproducibility of data obtaine d in different laboratories. A set of observations with the same time intervals were derived from a continuous function obtained for each pa tient by a back-propagation neural net trained on the raw data from th e patient. The classifications were obtained by a Kohonen neural net t rained in three ways: with p24 antigen profiles only, with CD4+ cell c ount profiles only and with both sets of profiles. The results show th at the clustering fashion of the two parameters closely resembles the clustering fashion of CD4+ only, rather than that of p24Ag, both with reference to cluster formation and with reference to distances between clusters.