Diagnostic Classification of Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia: A Compromise between Defining Lung Disease versus Long-Term Outcome Prediction

Abstract

the relative contributions that specific AM subtypes made to the overall transcriptional signal, our ability to detect differentially expressed genes may have been weakened. Despite this limitation, our bulk transcriptomic approach has advanced our understanding of AM function in ARDS by identifying AM-specific genetic programs that were associated with good versus poor outcomes. Future work is needed to identify the AM subtypes that might be responsible for the bulk transcriptional signatures we identified in our clinical cohort. We believe that “lumping” and “splitting” approaches are complementary in furthering our understanding of the pathobiology of syndromes such as ARDS and sepsis. Analytical approaches such as cellular deconvolution (7) may be able to bridge bulk transcriptomic datasets and clinical cohorts like ours with highly granular single-cell datasets to fully leverage the strengths of both lumping and splitting approaches to understand the mechanisms of complex human syndromes. n