Identification and Validation of Macrophage-Specific Biomarkers for Early Diagnosis and Risk Stratification in Atherosclerosis

Following the acquisition of the raw scRNA-seq data, sequencing reads were aligned to the reference genome, and unique molecular identifiers were used to quantify gene expression in individual cells.

The DoubletFinder and Seurat packages were used for initial data processing, which included quality control, normalization, and clustering. Each cell cluster was annotated based on the expression profiles of established marker genes, resulting in the identification of various cell clusters, which were then classified into the specific cell types. Cell type–specific gene sets for these clusters were generated based on their pronounced differential expression and specificity relative to other cell types.