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Statistical mixture modeling for cell subtype identification in flow cytometry.

ABSTRACT: Statistical mixture modeling provides an opportunity for automated identification and resolution of cell subtypes in flow cytometric data. The configuration of cells as represented by multiple markers simultaneously can be modeled arbitrarily well as a mixture of Gaussian distributions in the dimension of the number of markers. Cellular subtypes may be related to one or multiple components of such mixtures, and fitted mixture models can be evaluated in the full set of markers as an alternative, or adjunct, to traditional subjective gating methods that rely on choosing one or two dimensions. Four color flow data from human blood cells labeled with FITC-conjugated anti-CD3, PE-conjugated anti-CD8, PE-Cy5-conjugated anti-CD4, and APC-conjugated anti-CD19 Abs was acquired on a FACSCalibur. Cells from four murine cell lines, JAWS II, RAW 264.7, CTLL-2, and A20, were also stained with FITC-conjugated anti-CD11c, PE-conjugated anti-CD11b, PE-Cy5-conjugated anti-CD8a, and PE-Cy7-conjugated-CD45R/B220 Abs, respectively, and single color flow data were collected on an LSRII. The data were fitted with a mixture of multivariate Gaussians using standard Bayesian statistical approaches and Markov chain Monte Carlo computations. Statistical mixture models were able to identify and purify major cell subsets in human peripheral blood, using an automated process that can be generalized to an arbitrary number of markers. Validation against both traditional expert gating and synthetic mixtures of murine cell lines with known mixing proportions was also performed. This article describes the studies of statistical mixture modeling of flow cytometric data, and demonstrates their utility in examples with four-color flow data from human peripheral blood samples and synthetic mixtures of murine cell lines.

SUBMITTER: Chan C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2840702 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Statistical mixture modeling for cell subtype identification in flow cytometry.

Chan Cliburn C Feng Feng F Ottinger Janet J Foster David D West Mike M Kepler Thomas B TB

Cytometry. Part A : the journal of the International Society for Analytical Cytology 20080801 8

Statistical mixture modeling provides an opportunity for automated identification and resolution of cell subtypes in flow cytometric data. The configuration of cells as represented by multiple markers simultaneously can be modeled arbitrarily well as a mixture of Gaussian distributions in the dimension of the number of markers. Cellular subtypes may be related to one or multiple components of such mixtures, and fitted mixture models can be evaluated in the full set of markers as an alternative, ...[more]

PMID: 18496851

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Project description:BackgroundFlow cytometry is a widespread single-cell measurement technology with a multitude of clinical and research applications. Interpretation of flow cytometry data is hard; the instrumentation is delicate and can not render absolute measurements, hence samples can only be interpreted in relation to each other while at the same time comparisons are confounded by inter-sample variation. Despite this, most automated flow cytometry data analysis methods either treat samples individually or ignore the variation by for example pooling the data. A key requirement for models that include multiple samples is the ability to visualize and assess inferred variation, since what could be technical variation in one setting would be different phenotypes in another.ResultsWe introduce BayesFlow, a pipeline for latent modeling of flow cytometry cell populations built upon a Bayesian hierarchical model. The model systematizes variation in location as well as shape. Expert knowledge can be incorporated through informative priors and the results can be supervised through compact and comprehensive visualizations. BayesFlow is applied to two synthetic and two real flow cytometry data sets. For the first real data set, taken from the FlowCAP I challenge, BayesFlow does not only give a gating which would place it among the top performers in FlowCAP I for this dataset, it also gives a more consistent treatment of different samples than either manual gating or other automated gating methods. The second real data set contains replicated flow cytometry measurements of samples from healthy individuals. BayesFlow gives here cell populations with clear expression patterns and small technical intra-donor variation as compared to biological inter-donor variation.ConclusionsModeling latent relations between samples through BayesFlow enables a systematic analysis of inter-sample variation. As opposed to other joint gating methods, effort is put at ensuring that the obtained partition of the data corresponds to actual cell populations, and the result is therefore directly biologically interpretable. BayesFlow is freely available at GitHub.

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Project description:Microbial flow cytometry can rapidly characterize the status of microbial communities. Upon measurement, large amounts of quantitative single-cell data are generated, which need to be analyzed appropriately. Cytometric fingerprinting approaches are often used for this purpose. Traditional approaches either require a manual annotation of regions of interest, do not fully consider the multivariate characteristics of the data, or result in many community-describing variables. To address these shortcomings, we propose an automated model-based fingerprinting approach based on Gaussian mixture models, which we call PhenoGMM. The method successfully quantifies changes in microbial community structure based on flow cytometry data, which can be expressed in terms of cytometric diversity. We evaluate the performance of PhenoGMM using data sets from both synthetic and natural ecosystems and compare the method with a generic binning fingerprinting approach. PhenoGMM supports the rapid and quantitative screening of microbial community structure and dynamics.IMPORTANCE Microorganisms are vital components in various ecosystems on Earth. In order to investigate the microbial diversity, researchers have largely relied on the analysis of 16S rRNA gene sequences from DNA. Flow cytometry has been proposed as an alternative technology to characterize microbial community diversity and dynamics. The technology enables a fast measurement of optical properties of individual cells. So-called fingerprinting techniques are needed in order to describe microbial community diversity and dynamics based on flow cytometry data. In this work, we propose a more advanced fingerprinting strategy based on Gaussian mixture models. We evaluated our workflow on data sets from both synthetic and natural ecosystems, illustrating its general applicability for the analysis of microbial flow cytometry data. PhenoGMM supports a rapid and quantitative analysis of microbial community structure using flow cytometry.

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Statistical mixture modeling for cell subtype identification in flow cytometry.

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Statistical mixture modeling for cell subtype identification in flow cytometry.

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