Fig. 1

Hierarchical clustering of all sepsis mediators. The parameters were reordered using computerized hierarchical clustering with the corrplot package of R statistical environment. Hierarchical clustering is a statistical method for finding comparatively homogenous clusters of cases based on measured characteristics. The algorithm uses a set of dissimilarities or distances between cases when constructing the clusters and proceeds iteratively to join the most similar cases. Distances between clusters were recomputed by the Lance–Williams dissimilarity update formula according to the complete linkage method