BACKGROUND. Lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI) is a leading cause of death in children worldwide. LRTI diagnosis is challenging since non-infectious respiratory illnesses appear clinically similar and existing microbiologic tests are often falsely negative or detect incidentally-carried microbes. These challenges result in antimicrobial overuse and adverse outcomes. Lower airway metagenomics has the potential to detect host and microbial signatures of LRTI. Whether it can be applied at scale and in a pediatric population to enable improved diagnosis and precision treatment remains unclear. METHODS. We used tracheal aspirate RNA-sequencing to profile host gene expression and respiratory microbiota in 261 children with acute respiratory failure. We developed a random forest gene expression classifier for LRTI by training on patients with an established diagnosis of LRTI (n=117) or of non-infectious respiratory failure (n=50). We then developed a classifier that integrates the: i) host LRTI probability, ii) abundance of respiratory viruses, and iii) dominance in the lung microbiome of bacteria/fungi considered pathogenic by a rules-based algorithm. RESULTS. The host classifier achieved a median AUC of 0.967, driven by activation markers of T cells, alveolar macrophages and the interferon response. The integrated classifier achieved a median AUC of 0.986 and significantly increased the confidence of patient classifications. When applied to patients with an uncertain diagnosis (n=94), the integrated classifier indicated LRTI in 52% of cases and nominated likely causal pathogens in 98% of those. CONCLUSIONS. Lower airway metagenomics enables accurate LRTI diagnosis and pathogen identification in a heterogeneous cohort of critically ill children through integration of host, pathogen, and microbiome features.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

NHLBI, Chan Zuckerberg Biohub

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Multi-institutional study approved by the single Collaborative Pediatric Critical Care Research IRB at the University of Utah (protocol #00088656).

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Processed gene counts are available in the NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database under accession GSE212532.