Comparison of CCI values across patients

[chualec]

Hi,

I'm trying to understand how I can use cellphoneDB to analyze a cohort of patients with scRNA sequencing. Additionally, these patients were collected in different batches, and some have different cell sorts. But primarily I want to compare the two to see if certain interactions are present in disease vs healthy.

My idea is to use cellphoneDB to identify significant interactions within each patient, then see if there are overrepresentations of significant interactions in disease vs healthy, or run a statistical test between the interaction values between the two groups.

My questions are:
Would values between patients be comparable to each other (assuming that the scRNA are processed and normalized in the same way)
Are there other methods you would recommend trying to identify significant interactions between the two?

Thanks,