Single and multi-subject clustering of flow cytometry data for cell-type identification and anomaly detection

• Published in: BMC medical genomics Vol. 9; no. S2; p. 41
• Main Authors: Pouyan, Maziyar Baran, Jindal, Vasu, Birjandtalab, Javad, Nourani, Mehrdad
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England BioMed Central Ltd 10.08.2016; BioMed Central
• Subjects: Biomarkers - analysis; Cells; Cells - classification; Cells - cytology; Cluster Analysis; Flow cytometry; Flow Cytometry - methods; Fuzzy Logic; Humans; Identification and classification; Leukemia, Myeloid, Acute - pathology; Markov Chains; United States; Biaxial gating; Flow cytometry; Single-cell technology; Two-stage clustering; Anomaly detection; Cell-type population
• ISSN: 1755-8794; 1755-8794
• DOI: 10.1186/s12920-016-0201-x

Measurement of various markers of single cells using flow cytometry has several biological applications. These applications include improving our understanding of behavior of cellular systems, identifying rare cell populations and personalized medication. A common critical issue in the existing methods is identification of the number of cellular populations which heavily affects the accuracy of results. Furthermore, anomaly detection is crucial in flow cytometry experiments. In this work, we propose a two-stage clustering technique for cell type identification in single subject flow cytometry data and extend it for anomaly detection among multiple subjects. Our experimentation on 42 flow cytometry datasets indicates high performance and accurate clustering (F-measure > 91 %) in identifying main cellular populations. Furthermore, our anomaly detection technique evaluated on Acute Myeloid Leukemia dataset results in only <2 % false positives.