Research Paper Volume 12, Issue 24 pp 26063—26079

Figure 2. K-means cluster of CHB patients with three pairs of antiviral cytokines (IFN-γ, TNF-α, and IL-2) and five pairs of inhibitory molecules (PD-1, Tim-3, LAG-3, CTLA4, and 2B4) produced by CD4+ and CD8+ T cells. (A) Correlations among the three pairs of antiviral cytokines and five pairs of inhibitory molecules produced by CD4+ and CD8+ T cells were measured by the Spearman correlation. P<0.05 is colored, and the pseudocolors indicate correlation levels from negative (-1) to positive (1), ranging from a weak (white) to strong (red or blue) association strength. (B) Representative image of CHB patient clustering with three pairs of antiviral cytokines and five pairs of inhibitory molecules simultaneously produced by CD4+ and CD8+ T cells. The green balls represent patients of immuno-high (expressing high levels of antiviral cytokines and low levels of inhibitory molecules), and the red balls represent patients of immuno-low (expressing low levels of antiviral cytokines and high levels of inhibitory molecules), respectively. All of the 229 patients were divided into these two groups.