Privacy-Protecting, Reliable Response Data Discovery Using COVID-19 Patient Observations

There is an urgent need to answer questions related to COVID-19s clinical course and associations with underlying conditions and health outcomes. Multi-center data are necessary to generate reliable answers, but centralizing data in a single repository is not always possible. Using a privacy-protecting strategy, we launched a public Questions & Answers web portal (https://covid19questions.org) with analyses of comorbidities, medications and laboratory tests using data from 202 hospitals (59,074 COVID-19 patients) in the USA and Germany. We find, for example, that 8.6% of hospitalizations in which the patient was not admitted to the ICU resulted in the patient returning to the hospital within seven days from discharge and that, when adjusted for age, mortality for hospitalized patients was not significantly different by gender or ethnicity. One Sentence SummaryPublicly Sharing Knowledge on COVID19 Without Sharing Patient-Level Data: A Privacy-Protecting Multivariate Analysis Approach

Poor Correlation Between the New Statistical and the Old Empirical Algorithms for DNA Microarray Analysis

DNA microarray is currently the most prominent tool for investigating large-scale gene expression data. Different algorithms for measuring gene expression levels from scanned images of microarray experiments may significantly impact the following steps of functional genomic analyses. Affymetrix(R) recently introduced high-density microarrays and new statistical algorithms in Microarray Suit (MAS) version 5.0(R). Very high correlations (0.92 - 0.97) between the new algorithms and the old algorithms (MAS 4.0) across several species and conditions were reported. We found that the column-wise array correlations had a tendency to be much higher than the row-wise gene correlations, which may be much more meaningful in the following higher-order data analyses including clustering and pattern analyses. In this paper, not only the detailed comparison of the two sets of algorithms is illustrated, but the impact of the introducing new algorithms on the further clustering analysis of microarray data and of possible pitfalls in mixing the old and the new algorithms were also described.