Multicolour Flow Analysis to the Next Level

Multicolour Flow Cytometry (MFC) is widely used in biomedical research and diagnosis, to characterize the immune system at the single-cell level. Analytical technological advances allow the measurement of an increasing amount of proteins and receptors on each cell, thereby allowing the characterization of an increasing diversity and heterogeneity in cellular populations. This is of direct interest in immunophenotyping for precision medicine, monitoring of immune responses for early intervention and rare cell identification such as in Minimal Residual Disease diagnosis. These MFC applications will have large impact on biomedicine, but they need advanced unbiased handling and analysis of the MFC data. Several advanced and dedicated methods have been proposed for this purpose. Methods like SPADE, FlowSOM, DAMACY and t-SNE have either been adapted or specifically developed for the analysis of MFC data, but which method is most suitable for which MFC objective is not yet clear. In this workshop, we aim to find the advantages and drawbacks of each method for each MFC objective so that it becomes clear for end-users how to optimally explore their MFC data. For the data analysts participating in the workshop, it will become clear for which objective their method is most suited and how their methods need to be adapted to increase their application range within biomedical MFC.