dioscRi enables transferable prediction of clinical outcomes in multi-parameter cytometry data

Multi-parameter cytometry technologies enable high-dimensional analysis of immune cell populations at single-cell resolution. Deep learning has been widely applied to these datasets, but existing methods often struggle with transferability across datasets due to technical variability, batch effects and identification of biologically relevant cell populations, limiting their utility in clinical research. We present dioscRi, a transferable deep learning framework that integrates a maximum mean discrepancy variational autoencoder for normalization and de-noising, enhancing cross-dataset compatibility. Changes in cell type proportions and marker expression are identified by structuring these features within biologically or empirically derived cell type hierarchies. These hierarchies are incorporated directly into an overlapping group LASSO model, improving the prediction of clinical outcomes. When applied to a coronary artery disease study, dioscRi recapitulated several known immune associations. Benchmarking across multiple datasets demonstrated dioscRi's ability to transfer across cohorts with compatible marker panels and outperform existing methods on three of four datasets, establishing it as an interpretable tool for cytometry data analysis.