Diagnosis of sepsis by ai-aided proteomics using 2d electrophoresis images of patient serum incorporating transfer learning for deep neural networks

An accuracy of ≥98% was achieved in sepsis diagnosis using serum samples from 30 sepsis patients and 68 healthy individuals and a high-performance two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (HP-2D-PAGE) method developed here with deep learning and transfer learning algorithms. In this method, small-scale target domain data, which are collected to achieve our objective, are inputted directly into a model constructed with source domain data which are collected from a different domain from the target; target vectors are estimated with the outputted target domain data and applied to refine the model. Recognition performance of small-scale data is improved by reusing all layers, including the output layers of the neural network. Proteomics is generally considered the ultimate bio-diagnostic technique and provides extremely high information density in its two-dimensional electrophoresis images, but extracting the data has posed a basic problem. The present study is expected to solve that problem and will be an important breakthrough for practical utilization and future perspectives of proteomics in clinics after evaluation in clinical settings.